Fairy Tail Guildhall Triptych

[Image ID] Watercolour painting in three panels depicting three different versions of the same building. In the left panel it is grey and castellated, in the middle one it is like a pagoda and in the right panel it has windmill like sails on the top. [description end]

August this year marked 20 years since the publication of the first chapter of the manga ‘Fairy Tail’ by Hiro Mashima, and since it is my all-time favourite series I decided I wanted to paint something in tribute. There were a lot of different things from the series that I could have painted, but in the end I settled on a triptych featuring three iterations of the main guildhall building.

I had originally planned to order the three guildhalls chronologically from left to right, but as I was working on preliminary sketches I instead decided to put the original design of the guildhall in the centre.

I don’t think I could choose a favourite of the three, as each version of the guildhall building simply represents a different era from the story and makes me think of the specific adventures the characters went on from that building. However, having been a fan of Fairy Tail for a number of years now, there is something uniquely nostalgic about the original pagoda-esque guildhall design.

Unusually for me, this painting was done at A3 size. I normally only work at A4 but given the sheer amount of detail in this painting it was necessary to go bigger to do it justice. Due to that scale it would not have been easy to print out a digital sketch to the right size so I had to do all the sketching direct on the page with pencil.

After that I went over the sketch with waterproof fine liners. This was the least enjoyable part, as outlining all the tiny details took quite a while and was quite repetitive. Once the lines had thoroughly dried I then went in with the paint. Even that took several sittings across multiple days to finish, but the painting stage was much more enjoyable than the lining!

Although almost all my artwork is painted out of personal motivation, this piece is particularly special to me both because of the hours of painstaking effort it took to paint but also simply as a result of what Fairy Tail means to me as a series. In addition to being my favourite, Fairy Tail was also the first anime series I watched and by extension my introduction to anime/manga in general – a genre which has since influenced my work in many ways.