Paintings for Vasa and Korsholm - made by Julia Bäck / Work in progress 2/3

In my second work-in-progress post, I focus on the place I call home, Korsholm.

As with the previous painting, the first step was to choose a subject and draw the outlines.

An observant reader may have noticed a change of environment here. One week I swapped my living room in Korsholm for a kitchen in Södermalm. Okay, for those of you who don't know me personally, here's everything you need to know about me: I believe cheese trays are the meaning of life. I like to exaggerate. I could have bought a car with all the money I've spent on concerts, and I go to Stockholm as often as I can.

Before I start "coloring", I have to decide on the layout. The reason this is so important is that I want to balance darkness and light in the picture. Of course, the subjects are drawn realistically; if a wall is dark in real life, it is dark in my picture as well. At the same time, I’ve made sure that dark and light areas balance each other out in the picture. Imagine, for example, if all the dark walls and shadows were on the left side of the painting and all the bright and less painted areas were on the right side. The painting would almost lean on the wall because the left side would feel much heavier.

If I had to choose, I would say that the next phase is the most fun: shading and coloring. But what my background picture and I are trying to say here is that you need to have some patience. This lighthouse was neither complete, even, nor especially pretty after the first round with the marker. Layer upon layer, my friend. Keep on drawing those lines and trust the process and the final result.

Scanning ink works very well; the scanned versions look almost identical to the original. This wouldn't have worked nearly as well with pencil or, heaven forbid, watercolors.

When everything on paper was done by hand, I continued to work by hand on the drawing table in Photoshop. Some images required more adjustments than others. It was mostly about erasing pencil residues and making the black blacker to create greater contrasts. Contrasts are everything if you ask me (or my old teacher who taught me that, haha). These paintings have really traveled across the land and country, here on a boat over to Finland. Thank goodness for portable work!