For this week's #ArtAdventCalendar, in honour of the publication this year of my book "Dreams of Amarna", a sequence of Egyptological pieces..

A little watercolour of one of the basket-children.

#DreamsOfAmarna #EgyptianMarginalia #watercolour

For this week's #ArtAdventCalendar, in honour of the publication this year of my book "Dreams of Amarna", a sequence of Egyptological pieces..

This is one of the #EgyptianMarginalia I painted to illustrate the book, based on a small carved stone head, thought to depict one of the princesses, daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

#watercolour #DreamsOfAmarna

Whatever the level of devotion #Akhenaten's subjects felt to his singular god, the sun disc, they still had amulets and ornaments littering their houses.

I enjoyed trying to get the sense of gloss of the glaze and the uneven colour in some of them with my watercolours.

#DreamsOfAmarna #Watercolours #EgyptianMarginalia

Here's a #watercolour from beginning to end. The source photo is one I took of a reconstruction of Tutankhamen's tomb at the exhibition "Tutankhamen: his tomb and treasures", and it is quite breathtakingly complicated. I've found over the years that a detailed drawing has an inhibiting effect, so this is an experiment.

I started by placing everything approximately in pale colour. Once that was dry, I made up a dark mix, and just started somewhere, trying to put in the dark shapes, just as shapes...
Then several hours of Stare, Paint, Repeat.

Then, finally Finished. It's clearly, I think, still a painting, but it swam into focus as I added little bits of shadow and colour, gradually refining the result.

#watercolour #DreamsOfAmarna #EgyptianMarginalia

Stitching the #AmarnaFamilyGroup during lockdown, now rendered in #watercolour, to be one of the #EgyptianMarginalia for the #DreamsOfAmarna.

#ArtistsLife #painting

I may have said already that I think I don't have quite enough paintings for the marginalia.

Photography is an important archaeological discipline, and when we visited Lindisfarne castle a couple of weeks ago, I found a camera of about the right era ..

It's a very limited palette, only earth colours and ultramarine. Not finished, but a start.

#DreamsOfAmarna #EgyptianMarginalia #watercolour #LimitedPalette

This painting was done during lockdown, using a very grainy photo of Flinders Petrie outside one of the empty tombs he lived in when excavating in Egypt, early in his association with the Egypt Exploration Society , and it taught me a lot.

Here you see the whole painting, using entirely earth colours and some salt effects. I chased tones all round the image, and then sat back...

#DreamsOfAmarna #EgyptianMarginalia #Watercolours