Queen Bee Rough Color Sketch

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I transferred an earlier pencil sketch to paint a rough concept of the Queen Bee protagonist from my series "Tangle." She also appeared in this previous sketch, but I've added the hip pieces for more interest, the final design of them is still something I'm tweaking. There's nothing outwardly bee-ish about here, although I've debated about adding small porcelain wings to the back of her porcelain bust. I wanted her to have a crown, but nothing too literal, so I tried out some stretched diamond-shaped rays...they're supposed to be hovering at an angle, though hard to read in this image, so I may make adjustments so that aspect reads better.

Queen Bee Sketch

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This was a quick sketch for the heroine of what will eventually be a series of paintings. The paintings will be a series of narrative still lives about bees, life, death, and war. I've been collecting objects over the last year: new, antique, natural, and handmade...to be assembled into compositions for the narrative to play out against. The queen (in the above sketch) is represented as a human, with her head and neck covered in a white-porcelain shell. The tentative title of the series is "Tangle: The We That Wage."