Claire Presents Herself was painted in September 2018 in acrylic on to a base drawing using coloured marker pens. Image is 920 by 1200 and displayed at 50%. This is based on the Outlander television Series 3 Episode 6 scene where Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser presents her body to Jamie Fraser after a twenty year separation.
Here is the initial painting, providing ground colours but not everywhere using colour wheel contrasting colours (or close) as has often been the case. Because many of her shadows were green, so was the body colour rather than blue. Shown at 37.5 %
This is the marker pens drawing from the beginning. It was done sat in front of my computer and using one of the purchased DVDs after brightening the image. The curtain extends further right in my drawing than in the scene. Once drawn I painted this 'blind' to the source. Claire stands and stares at Jamie. They are going to engage in their first and long sex after twenty years apart in 1766.
Previously, back in her time, two hundred and two years later than Jamie's, and around twenty years after the Culloden event that separated them, Claire is back in Scotland from her adopted country, the USA, with her twenty year old daughter Brianna. Claire's twentieth century husband is dead from a car accident. They were at Frank's friend the rector's funeral in 1968. Their Scottish host, Roger, adopted son of the reverend, an historian like Claire's late husband, and immediate love interest with Brianna, discover here via initial disbelief that Jamie is her real father with her conception in 1745. Claire, daughter Brianna and host Roger discover that Jamie was alive after Culloden, but is unable to locate him. Roger is himself a long descendent of another time traveller, with a two hundred and twenty five year passage back. Soon he goes to see them in Boston USA with additional evidence of Jamie's location two hundred and three years ago. Thus, with her daughter's blessing, Claire crosses the Atlantic into Scotland and finds him. In the book, I understand, Claire, Brianna and Roger are already in Scotland and Claire's preparations to return happen there. As I write this, I only have the first book, and I intend to buy the second and possibly the third. However, in my opinion, the whole story loses its roots half way through television series three, and becomes in series three a ridiculous set of coincidences and transplanted characters, demanding way more than a suspension of desbelief around the structure, and the whole thing later shifts to be about the American War of Independence.
In Series One, the witches trial, which was impossible in 1744, is made more impossible in the television series as an 'ad hoc' Church trial with still a power to burn the guilty to death, and even more so because the village has a Roman Catholic priest giving evidence when religion in Scotland jumped between authoritarian bishops and banishing them in a purer Presbyterian form, before the Episcopalian non-jurors were formed as a minority Anglican Church. The trial action takes place in a Protestant chapel with a coloured window. I'd like to see that place, in 1744, apparently near Inverness.
