My father is starting cardio rehab, and I asked if he'd like me to watercolor a paisley body part for his recovery.
He requested a bicep.
Ta-da:
Those red circles and stripes represent skeletal muscle (cross-section and outside views);
the ochre-and-lavender spiral is the humerus bone;
the dashes around the edge are striated muscle where it attaches to tendon; other bits are far-abstracted neurons-n-stuff.
I look up image sources, but I don't plan the pattern out beforehand.
Halfway through, I noticed it started looking like something by Scottish artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928).
He was from Glasgow, and while the "paisley" pattern originates in the east (Persia, India...), in the west it's named after the textile-producing town of Paisley, near Glasgow, where "from roughly 1800 to 1850, using Jacquard looms, the women of Paisley
adapted the traditional design primarily by weaving woollen shawls"
[--from "A Brief History of Paisley".
Here's one of the original Paisley designs on paper, based on the Kashmir cypress cone, from here.
