“Sofa so good”, as one would joke. Last weekend we went to find a sofa-bed for my new apartment upstairs. It will take about 6 weeks to deliver but it was on sale. So what better way is it than to share this! Rather than paint the background first and “take it on from there”, I did the opposite and firstly drew me and my BF sitting down.
After having outlined them in permanent ink pen, I also did the same for the sofa. I was not sure what to do next though! But I thought I’d use my intuition and start painting away! I recently discovered the beauty of bottled ink, by Ecoline, to be precise. I find the colours so vivid and quite amazed by the transparency they bring. So I created layer upon layer using ink, some collaged paper (newspaper bits and patterned origami paper) and some acrylic paint scraped with palette knife.
For the faces I used deli paper on which I paint using aquarelle crayons and pencils and spreading the colour with a wet brush. Then glued them onto the paper with matte medium. I find that this helps to make the characters stand out more. I then drew hearts and flowers around, and for the sofa I blended some paint to make some grey and mixed that with modelling paste to add some texture.
It was a bit of a hit and miss as far as background was concerned. I wanted to make it light blue but realised that it was too close in shade to the blue shirt of HJ and the violet ink in the background was too blue. So I modified it and added some green, thereby giving a more turquoisey emerald green colour which came out beautifully. Then I made HJ’s blue short more cobalt blue to enhance the shade difference.
Upon finishing it, I realised I was a lot bigger in size than my BF! I think it’s because I made my face bigger. The hair as well. Never mind, he said, “it’s me after losing 10 kgs”. Well I guess that could also be me after putting on 10 kg! We just laughed it off. Anyway, am happy with it. Art work is meant to be fun!
My Kawaii Quarter 