Given I’ll be a bit busy the next few days, this may be the final Halloween-themed piece I do this year. It took a few days to do as I have been working on different projects at the same time and finally completed this one a few days ago. Since it may be the last Halloween one, I figured the least I ought to do is paint a duo with my boyfriend! Unfortunately, he’s not a fan of Halloween but anyways I thought it would be cute, creative and fun hehe.
First I drew the outline by pencil. I use a good pad of mixed media paper by Strathmore with a velium finish. So am batgirl and he’s in a skeleton costume but our costumes are not so consistent as am wearing a crown too and he’s got a mask on rather than a skull cap. A bit of variety.
And then I just simply filled in with paint mainly acrylic paint. I totally recommend Jane Davenport’s portrait paints when painting the face. Although you can of course always mix and match using your own palette, I can get a bit lazy at times. For the orange I mixed Dylusions Tangerine Orange paint with fluorescent orange ink, The cape is in gold using Amsterdam Acrylics. The hair? I firstly drew the strands in with Neocolor II water-soluble crayons and spread the colours a bit with a wet brush without over doing it so the colours of the strands are still visible. For the small areas, like BF’s bucket and the collar and bat (not yet coloured in the picture) on my outfit, I merely used markers, more precisely Faber Castell’s Pitt Artists pens.
At this point, I thought I’d start painting the background and work on the fine details later. Just doodled a bit with my oil pastels so that when I paint over it in watercolour, I get some cool effects. Drew in the eyes with a pencil, to be traced over in pen later. Used some runny fluorescent yellow fluid acrylic in some areas too. Cool!
Just a small detail I wanted to share. On the crown, which was filled in with black gesso, I grabbed a cats paw stencil and with a small palette knife, scraped over it some modelling paste mixed with fluorescent orange acrylic ink. The remaining paint was merely dotted around in the crown. I think it looks effective. My pride and joy here!
For the background, I made a wash using some green liquid Hydrus watercolour by Dr. Ph Martins. Notice how the oil pastel doodles stand out! The rest of the paint was smeared on stencils using a short hard bristled brush. For the eyes, I used the Pitt Artist’s pens with the whites being dotted on with a white Uni Posca marker. The skeleton bones and skull head was reinforced using that pen as well. Et voila, another kawaii Halloween painting!
Although the painting looks quite simple compared to the past illustrations I’ve done, there were quite a few tiny bits like the bat on my costume, cat on the bucket and skeleton bones that required precision especially when trying to paint around them. I recently started using my Pitts Artists pen again which comes in handy for those tiny bits. In the end I made it through and am well pleased with the outcome. Happy Trick or Treating!!
My Kawaii Quarter 