Happy Valentine’s Day!! 14 February today, and I’ll be posting up and writing about my final piece of this five-part Valentine’s series. It’s the Pièce de Résistance! I actually completed it last weekend but I wanted to leave it till the last. This time, I went back to mixed media combining gelli printing, stamps and stencils as well as collages of origami paper cut outs and an illustration I drew with Copic markers. Variety is the spice of life!
Background of Love
I went for some stencils with a series of heart-shapes and grabbed my Distress Oxide stamp inks in a variety of pink and red shades. Firstly, I used my Gelli plate with those stencils. Then I rolled out the excess ink on the brayer all over and around the edges of the paper (pad of Strathmore Mixed Media paper, 190 gsm). And then I added more layers of the hearts by cleaning the stencils with baby wipes. As you can see, I don’t like to waste any ink! I further continued stencilling (also cleaning with wet wipes on the paper) and ink stamping combining red and pink colours until I was satisfied with the result. Looks great I think. Actually, I even considered leaving the painting as it was!
Drawing the Main Characters
Leaving the Background of Love aside, I proceeded in sketching the Mini Me and Boyfriend (or the Two Little Love Birds) with Copic markers. I used a sheet of Bleedproof Marker Pad by Transotype which apparently is recommended for alcohol-based ink because it prevents the ink from leaking through. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it is only 70 gsm which is not thick enough for solo pieces so I use it for creating collage pieces as below. Pretty straight forward. I still need to figure out how I can get the markers appear less streaky on paper. I was advised to use circular strokes rather than straight up and down or across. Will keep that in mind then! Anyhow, I the piece out carefully with razor, ready to be applied on the background.
Kawaii Collages
With a series of origami paper at hand, I was able to create some very pretty cut-outs using some heart and flower craft-punches. I even used an old scrap of paper I had used for a previous work (the yellow and orange one). First I glued on the Little Love Birds around the centre of the background with some Gel Medium before placing the random bits of these heart and flower shapes. It was a matter of adding them one by one until I was happy with their positions to create a well-balanced piece. And now….
These days, I don’t often find the spare time to do mixed media work like this. January and February are just busy months for me for work, and you need to set up time to be able to prepare and clean up. Thus, I was very excited with this session and can’t wait to resume once I got freer time. And now I have to work on my ink application. Circular and not straight across, that is. Apart from the technical issue, I’m very happy with this kawaii piece. All pink and lovey dovey and oh so Valentine’s like! So Happy Valentine’s to all!
My Kawaii Quarter 