Her newer, grid-like works are a continuation of the comics she’s produced over the years. “Rather than being just one image, most of them are composed of a collection of different ‘panels’ pushed together, creating an impression of all these different elements that combine to create how I perceive a location at a particular time.”
Recently, Peony has started to combine pastels with acrylic gouache. This achieves a texture she describes as “chewy and rich”, while still feeling like a drawing rather than painting – “a skill I am very bad at”, she says. “Something I always tell my students is ‘if it’s fun for you to make it will almost always be fun to look at’. Sometimes I can catch myself getting too controlled and obsessed over wanting the end product to look ‘good’, which is when the images I’m making come out poorly.”
Peony plans to expand this series into larger pieces, in different locations, and by adding even more layers of texture to achieve the aforementioned ‘chewyness’. Like all of her projects, the results are always uncertain, but “we’ll see where it goes!” the illustrator ends.