Apart from painting, I also enjoy photography and figured why not combine the two for a change? Whilst at a fishing village in Hokkaido we came across heaps of empty scallop shells, and I decided to take a beautiful photograph depicting the various patterns, sizes and textures.
I wanted to use that as a background for another kawaii character illustration. It’s supposed to be me and HJ in a daze because we can’t believe what an awesome part of Japan we ended up in. Our mind was flying around and all over the place as we came across one amazing natural phenomenon to another on this amazing peninsula. Hence Shore Angels.
I didn’t want to paint directly over the printed photo since I used the standard HP printer with standard cartridge ink using plain paper and was afraid anything water-based would smudge the ink and ruin the artwork. Luckily I had some tracing paper at hand and decided to make a separate drawing on that. This would give a somewhat transparent look and still make the background visible.
The drawing was a combination of permanent felt pens and coloured pencils. It has been a while since I last used both. Outlines of us and our hair were drawn in pen for a bolder appearance and filled in with coloured pencils to soften and enhance transparency.
Then with some metallic acrylic paint, I coloured in the wings. Then I cut out the drawing to glue onto the printed photograph. I had some extra gold paint left on the palette so decided randomly to paint some streaks over the artwork for a more gilded look.
I decided I wanted to add some texture on the wings so took some modelling paste and combined it with the metallic paints. It certainly worked! Although that part of the paper crumpled up a bit, it seemed to look quite effective. With a few finishing touches, I was happy with the result. Nothing more to add because I wanted to keep it simple yet stunning.
My Kawaii Quarter 