Love Forever

I say love forever because no matter how we age with time, love is here to stay. Where did this inspiration emerge from? The thought just happened to develop as I began painting a pink heart from some leftover paint from an earlier work.

From this thought, I decided to doodle a bit around the pink heart using layers of ecoline ink, acrylic paint and scribbling love in oil pastels. All in varying shades of pink, green and blue and looking refreshing and leafy. This time I didn’t cover too much of the paper with the doodles and scribbles as I wanted to let that heart be focal point.

And thus even when I painted the background, I carefully skimmed around the heart. Merely used a light and darker shade of yellow as well as some white. To provide contrasting textures, the heart was painted mixing the pink with gloss medium whilst the yellows for the background were combined with matte medium.

Now time to draw “us” on top! I drew a rough outline firstly with charcoal pencil and once happy with the sizes and shapes, traced over it with some light brown paint by mixing yellow ochre with ultramarine blue. The outlines looked pretty cool as they were as they allowed the pink heart to be focal point. As such, I was juggling over whether or not to colour “us” in with an additional layer of paint. I decided against it.

And what to do with the eyes? Oops, I had actually conveniently forgotten to add them as I washed my paint brushes! Asked my BF what he thought. He agreed that here the painting looked nice and mysterious without. Agreed.

I cleaned up the painting a bit by toning down the dark green on our faces by brushing a layer of gesso over them and painting over them in yellow. With some bright green and blue ink I also doodled some hearts on the background. Our hair was highlighted with some bronze marker, and with some white ink, dots were added along the outline of our outfits. On the corners and edges of the paper, I stamped a little silver ink directly from its pad to add some dimension. I think it’s all now good to go!

Interesting how this painting turned out unintentionally. First with a simple pink heart to mean love. Then by chance deciding our figures would remain faceless as if to symbolise timelessness. And now how I’d love to call this painting Love Forever.