I’m taking a pause on the baskets, and focusing on backgrounds, foregrounds and sky.
My main stylistic reference materials for this project (medieval wood-cuts and engravings), generally have no sky at all, and only texture and line to delineate a foreground, and (only sometimes) a very distant horizon.
The issue is that I’m walking a fine line between my own imagery (from a mixture of drawings not always to scale, and photos of real people) and the peculiar perspectives of these early prints that make the figures look like giants!
Also, to complicate things further, I am not going to box the figures in quite as much as these early prints, as I want the work to hang as long banners- so the temptation is to create long foregrounds beneath their feet, and details in the distant background. The strange perspective they use often places the horizon level with the ankles of standing figures or the waist of seated ones. So that foreground details such as a blade of grass, will be the same size as a tree in the distance!
Anyway, to create a foreground for the bottom third of the my prints, I will need to use almost a whole 8′ x 4′ board.
I’m setting this one to interlock with the legs of the standing figure I have completed, but it might also be possible to adapt it to the other figures by adding or removing sections of wood-block.
