Teddy Rides Doggy

Now that the days get shorter and darker earlier, it’s not as easy to finish a painting in a day. I start around lunchtime after dealing with personal matters in the morning. And when am busy the rest of the day I try and fit in my art sessions as much as possible. Preferring daylight to artificial lighting, I don’t paint in the evenings and use that time to relax and unwind or write up my blog! And I like to take my time with my painting as I come up with creative ideas. So I started this painting on Thursday afternoon and leisurely worked on it yesterday.

I was in the mood to experiment with different types of inks on one paper. To start, I wet some Mixed Media paper by spritzing some water on it and added some drops of acrylic ink (magenta), india ink (yellow) and ecoline ink (green). Once dry, I wiped some Staz-on ink stamp on stencil, using blue, green and pink. Then, in turn, when dry, I applied some ink spray on top using Dylusions Rose Quartz. And wow, look at all the bright vivid colours!

With some areas of colours being too harsh, I lightly applied some white gesso where needed to play it down. I let it all dry and then, after penciling in, painted an outline of my painting using acrylic ink (Dylusions Chopped Pesto). So why doggy and a teddy bear on top? I was inspired about some very cute story I read on the news about how someone’s pet dog in New Zealand had rescued a baby Koala bear in the wild. But I decided to make a variation of it and have a teddy I bear ride a dog!

Continuing the next day, I then coloured in the background in three tiers of colours. I started on the bottom and works my way up. Bottom third was in Dylusions Polished Jade, followed by Dylusions Vibrant Turquoise and finally Amsterdam Turquoise Blue for the sky. To allow some layers below to show through, I scraped a bit of paint off whilst wet using a satay stick as well as Jane Davenport’s scraper on one of her “mermaid brushes”.

I still felt the background though could do with more so I stamped in some leaves and then traced over them using Fabre Castell markers, one in gold and the other in black. Then I added some origami paper collages in parts of the doggy and teddy and another bigger one as teddy’s balloon. The eyes were also drawn in with black marker and doggy’s in water-soluble crayon in brown and the whites with Uni Posca marker. Then I completed the painting with some dotted details using again the same white marker. And now:

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “paint over the bottom layers” because I normally like the way they are and prefer to keep them as background as is. Quite nice to go back to doing something different again though, and glad that it all fell in place with the beautiful inked layers still exposed amid the vivid background colours. I also enjoyed experimenting with various types of inks. Variety certainly spices it all up! Look forward to creating more kawaii but pretty stuff like this.