I recently rediscovered the joys of reading. Like many gifted and talented undiagnosed neurodivergent kids in the 90s and Naughties, fantasy worlds were my haven from a world that didn’t understand me. I burned through books faster than a furnace set to 451 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly clearing out my local library’s JFIC and YA sections between the ages of 11 and 15. And then as the story goes, college extinguished that one unadulterated joy. The responsibilities of adulthood coupled with coming out as queer in the conservative southern United States left me too exhausted to do much of anything outside of work and surviving. Then the pandemic hit and with the extra time I got a tiny taste of getting lost in a book again. It was Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith, my favorite book as a teen and still one of my favorites today, but it still wasn’t quite enough to break through that wall that had been cultivated over the previous eight years. But then this summer I swallowed my physical book purist pride and got a Kobo e-reader. The wall was destroyed and the furnace rekindled. I reread Crown Duel to get me back into the swing of things, then demolished A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fourth Wing in short order. While neither of those were the most wonderful series ever, I was inspired to add a bit more whimsy to my art.
The idea started with the two themes of the books: dragons and roses. I combined them with the traditional French country pattern Toile de Jouy, the iconic fabrics of monochromatic pastoral scenes or florals on a white background. My grandmother had curtains patterned like this, and I have fond memories of watching the morning light filter through them. It seemed like a fun and relaxing project, short and sweet, quick to whip up and make wallpapers and fabrics with.
Little did I know what was in store for me.
What made all of this possible was Procreate’s new brush update. It has an entire section dedicated to journaling, including graph paper. Could I have just imported a graph paper onto my canvas years ago? Yes, but the brain is not yet fully understood by science so the graph paper brush was essential. After fiddling around for a little bit, I had the concept of how to create a pattern without a tiling tool relatively established, and pretty quickly had the sketch and placement of the rose vines and dragons in place. It was time to refine the sketch; the finish line was in sight.
Refining the dragons was a fun exercise. I discovered the brush I had chosen to sketch with, the new Bruny brush, was just a blast to work with and I got a little carried away with the shading. The original intent was to refine the sketch, then go over it with ink brushes to create the carved woodblock look traditional to toile de jouy fabric. I ended up liking my refined sketch so much that I decided to just finish the rendering and leave it in its more loose form. This decision sealed my fate.
With the dragons done, it was time to move on to the roses. I started shading a few petals and that’s when I realized what I had gotten myself into. In order to match the styles, this was going to take a while. A very very long while. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been filling in leaves, lightly texturing flower petals, building layer upon layer of shading to create what is turning into one of the most labor intensive drawings I have ever done. The previous record for the longest drawing was Incitatus, my emperor’s horse with time consuming Roman and Byzantine style mosaics on the borders. He took 41 hours and 39 minutes to complete, with 57, 093 individual strokes. Where we currently stand with this monochromatic repeating pattern is 43 hours and 38 minutes, and a whopping 79,133 strokes. All this for a single tile in a repeating pattern, inspired by a couple of mediocre book series I read to get back into enjoying reading again. And with what I have left, I’m estimating another seven hours at least, pushing me over the fifty hour mark.
Will it be worth it? Absolutely, I’m loving how this is turning out. But I also intend to make multiple versions of this, replacing the dragons with other creatures or objects, just to make the hours of labor feel a little more wisely invested. Stay tuned for the finished pattern.
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