My entry for the 2023 Secret Sitter community art project. This year I worked with archival pen, ink wash, coloured inks and watercolours on illustration paper.

Secret Sitter is a community art project where participants are assigned at random, and in secret, another artist to be their subject. Everyones’ creations, and the identity of their secret sitters, are revealed all at once at the end of the project during a digital and in-person exhibition. Secret Sitter is closely associated with Gladdy Drawing Club and the community of Sydney based artists who do life drawing there. The first ever Secret Sitter was held in 2021 during the long second covid lockdown in Sydney.

Crab Chronicles was inspired by my sitter’s elegant and fantasy-esque features and her reference photos shot on an overcast day near some beautiful beach rock formations. I’d also recently been on a camping trip with my nephews where we spent a few nights down by the beach chasing after crabs with flashlights. I mixed all these details together to create a fun and sort of silly scene involving a rock monster fighting back some giant crabs while protecting a fantasy maiden.

I was strangely nervous about adding the ink wash and other colours to the finished pen line work. I was worried about “ruining” the work I’d already done and I didn’t quite trust myself to follow the process and take some risks. I took this as a sign I really needed to push through that door and that I need to keep pushing forward with colouring and embellishment experiments on any future illustrations.