Easter egg

 I was asked by Landskrona town council if I could decorate an egg for Easter.

 OK, I thought, that won’t take too long. 

Then I was told it would be 1.5 meters high and made of fibre glass. I started to panic when I realised I only had a week. Then it turned out I actually only had four days as the egg had to be varnished twice before delivery. 

The first sketches were done
on hard boiled eggs.

        I had some vague idea in my head 

        and thought of  sketching this on 

        paper but to see if it would work 

        three dimensionally I had to try it 

       on the actual egg shape.

       So I boiled a couple of eggs to try 

       out the idea with a simple pencil 

       drawing. I should really have 

       blown the eggs so I could keep 

       them indefinitely but my intension

       was just to use them as temporary 

       sketches.

The egg when it was delivered to my studio. 

                                                   
The egg was made of glass fibre and delivered to my studio 6 days before deadline. It wasn’t heavy but rather cumbersome and had to be balanced on a bucket with bricks in to stabilise it while I painted.

My idea was to create the impression of eggs in a nest in an egg. 

I started by painting entwined straws and blades of grass in black and white around the whole egg after masking the shapes of the eggs with plastic.

I painted paynes grey as a background and
while it was still wet I used a colorshaper to
scrape and move the colour around.

I then added transparent yellow ochre to cover the blades of grass and filled in darker shadows between the grass and areas of white where the pale, dry grass was lit up by the sun.

I also painted a transparent
blue shadow above and below the eggs
to create a three dimensional and concave effect in the nest.

After the background of grass and tiny twigs was dry I could
mask the outlines of the eggs and paint them with layers
of greenish blue in different shades. I then added deep shadows and bright highlights.

The finished egg in Landskrona square. If I had been able to spend more time on it it would have taken at least another month.

The back of the egg.