Spring Cat

Am quite inspired by the work of mixed media artist Tracey Verdugo 👩🏻‍🎨 and been following her workbook “Paint Mojo”. 😇 Here I made a collage of cutouts, bits of washi (Japanese paper), ink stamping and stencils 🎨 Was definitely in the mood for bright colours! 😎

The challenge is titled “Outside the Square!” and we start off by dividing the canvas (in my case a humble A4 paper) in 25 squares of 5×5 with a pencil. I chose 16 squares of 4×4. Then she gets us to draw something with watercolour pencil on a text of paper like a page from a book which inspires us. I cut out some random bit from a Dutch newspaper and drew a cat!

We use a watercolour pencil because the next step is to paint over the drawing with titanium white paint diluted with water. The wet paint will smear the drawing for effect and yet make it still visible from underneath.

So far so kawaii. We then make a collage of bits of paper, and I chose to do something Japanese. Cut outs of sakura cherry blossoms, a teddy bear and a heart. Scraps of remaining paper I had used as cutouts from previous work. Used washi Japanese patterned origami paper for this too. And somewhere the cat drawing I had done is added.

The lines of the square were traced over using dark umber paint (I mixed ultramarine blue with burnt sienna). After letting it dry I began painting around the paper by first filling in the squares and then merging the colours and letting them overlap outside the squares and hence “Outside the Squares!”

It was a very warm sunny day when this painting was in progress but I was feeling a bit tired because of the heat. In need of some uplifting and to match the beautiful day, I opted to go for light green, bright blue and magenta. And with some white of course. Here I also experimented with combining with acrylic gel for some sheen..

Sorry for this bad photo but it was getting dark outside as I was progressing. After painting around, I added more layers by rubber stamping flowers in dark grey. I also grabbed some hearts and flowers stencils and pressed some paint thickened with modelling paste for a thicker texture.

I added some finishing touches by taking some pink and white ink and drawing in some small hearts and squiggly patterns randomly around. Finally I painted over a few bits with gold paint to give it some vavavoom.

Overall pleased with the outcome especially with the colour scheme and doing something different like draw a cat for a change! Will definitely do something similar again….