Making of “Burn the Witch” and “Join the innocent”.

I crated these pieces in my final year of college as two illustrations bolted back to back displayed in a gallery.
The images aren’t perfect or my best work. However i am still very proud of them. As they finalised my love of ink and large
scale work.

They were done on hardboard, using mostly fine line pens and bottled India ink. (rip to the three 0.003 markers lost to these drawings.)

The thing i most struggled with in this first piece was the light. Getting the right patterns on the body from the fire was very difficult to get right and i still don’t think i succeeded. both drawings were made on a very tight time scale and with the size i did sacrifice a lot of my normal polish and perfectionist nature in the making of them on time for the exhibition. Both drawings took 4 weeks of exclusively drawing to finish beside my course work.

The original digital sketch for the image.

These pieces were clearly based on the 1600s witch trials.
Meant to show two halves of the idea when walked around in the galley space. one half a more glorified portrayal. A calm, attractive woman with flowing hair burning at the stake showing how we view the trails in the modern day.
The second shows a more real idea. She’s dangerously thin to show the torture these women were put through during interrogations. She’s screaming and drowning, a much more common method of killing witches at the time.

In both there are faceless dead, representing the many women forgotten to history who were killed not only in Salem but around the world.
In the first there are hanging feet but they are drowned in darkness to show how the dead are overlooked in pop culture. in the second the hands at the bottom of the piece are bright and on full show.

I would love to come back to these pieces and re work them at some point to get across more of my intent and to improve them with my current skill.