ABU SIMBEL HATHOR (Weekly Art Project #10. 2020)

Wow! What a week!
Like so many people we've had the disappointment of having to cancel our much anticipated upcoming overseas trip. It highlights to me again, just how fortunate I am to be in a position to travel in the first place & how blessed I am to have had traveled before & experienced & seen so much.

All the more pleasure then in sitting down to my weekly art project yesterday & allowing myself to recall our trip to Abu Simbel located at the very bottom of Egypt.

Our first sight of this impressive temple complex was out the airplane window! With two nights accommodation close by we had ample time to enjoy the impressive Light & Sound Show & explore the Temples.

This week's inspiration comes from a relief inside Nefertari's Temple which is dedicated to Hathor.

We were not allowed to take photos inside, so I made use of my little A5 sketch book & drew my favourite aspects as quickly as I could in low light.  THANKFULLY I labelled where I drew them! This drawing of Hathor in cow form on a barge surrounded by lotus is my favourite & immediately comes to mind when I think of that trip.

Although I knew I wanted to base this week's project on that drawing, I also wanted to be open to other options, so I flicked through my sketch book & redrew some of those quick sketches, all the time thinking..." How am I going to do this??".

After coming up with a plan & drawing up my design, I then contemplated colour.  I didn't want to replicate the tones-of-stone look, which would have been the accurate representation of what I'd seen, so I chose to use my imagination & infuse some colour into the scene.

This sort of project is perfect for using up colour play samples, which is exactly what I chose to use for my first set of outlines. Those stitched lines give only a glimpse to what the finished design will look like.  Here's how the cutting back went...

This was as far as my initial planning got me. It's okay. It's a sweet outcome. But it lacked a lot of interest & oomph.

Thankfully I had kept my cutting-back scraps, so I retrieved them & added a few more lotuses & some lines of stitch & reached a result that I was more happy with.

This is it.
It is amazing how colour, removing a few components and  adding a few other components can transform a design. This looks & feels like quite a different image to that of my drawing, yet they are also so very close to each other.  This was a fun exercise & a delightful trip...albeit via memory...back to Abu Simbel.