Re-paint: Ye Xian (the “Chinese Cinderella”)

ACRYLIC ON FOUND CALENDAR • 12.5″ x 30″
$88 • Email julie@juliemeridian.com to buy this artwork ⇢

Update: This is one of what ended up being a series of Chinese folktale calendar repaints.

This is the third repaint of a calendar: this time the story I ended up picking is the “Chinese Cinderella”, Ye Xian.

Every year House of Chu in SJ gives out these calendar scrolls for the (Roman) calendar year with descriptions from the Chinese zodiac. The calendars aren’t always correlated to the nearest Chinese zodiac year, but they always have some kind of interesting illustration on them. I use the illustration as the base for a painting of Chinese folktales and mythology: so far, the association between dragons and water gods, and the rabbit in the moon.

I wasn’t sure what to do with this one when I first started, so I painted over the calendar portions and filled in the overall color scheme. I have one more calendar to go (the one with horses) so I filled that one in at the same time too. I kept the other calendars nearby for reference about the overall feel, and after staring at the koi one for a while decided I should fill in more fish. While thinking about fish, I remembered the “Chinese Cinderella” story. I mimicked the style of the fish and painted in the large golden koi and a few others.

By this point I knew I’d make the lilypads the most prominent repeated elements, outlined in black like the clouds and river in the previous calendars. I also wanted to have a hint of Ye Xian here, reaching out to the fish. I couldn’t eyeball the right spots to put them in, so I needed to mock up what to do next. At this time Adobe announced a few new drawing apps, so I tried out Adobe Sketch on the iPad. It didn’t really suit the precision and duplication I needed for this style of mockup, but I made do with a very basic, very rough sketch.

While that was enough to get the lilypads in the right place, it was just looking off. I realized it was just looking way too busy. I took a fresh photo and reworked it in Photoshop to simplify it. The most confusing part ended up being the bushy plant at the top. Once I took that out, it was easy to fix it in Photoshop and pretty straightforward to paint it. When I actually repainted it, I left hints of it visible since it looked like an underwater plant.