Carmen

22" x 30" watercolour, 2005

17" x 14", ink on paper, 2005

This mock opera poster is for Carmen by Georges Bizet, my favourite opera. I'd like to eventually do a few more for this show --especially featuring Escamillo, the toreador. Of course, those period Spanish soldier uniforms are pretty cool, too, so there'd have to be at least one or two featuring Don José.

I actually painted the bottom poster first, to test the composition. The white parts of the dress were actually a gold material (but not lamé) and the red parts (here in watercolour) are plastic "gem stones". It's a beautiful dress, really.

The watercolour version foreshadows Carmen's fate at the hands of Don Hoser. The dress is solid red all the way down in reality, but I wanted to play with it a bit and lighten the lower part because the black area was so strong.

For both of these posters I created the text digitally and then projected the words onto my painting surface and then finished them by hand. "Georges Bizet" and the outline of "Carmen" in the watercolour painting are done in ink...come to think of it, I think the black of the dress was also done in ink, but I don't have the painting here to check. The gold is done with gold craft paint, so it has that metallic look. The white part of the paper (in both) is simply the paper left white.

I used the same photo reference from the ink painting to paint my Carmen Mural in Chesterfields.