Happy Easter Monday! Today is Easter Monday, and I’m thrilled to share with you the final part of my kawaii Easter Bunny Trilogy following Bunny and Baby Teddies and Bunny in the Sun. It’s been a very beautiful sunny few days out here in the Netherlands which put me in a happy sultry mood, even thinking of summer already! Today, I’m showing you what I did with the scrap piece I used for the Bunny stencil/cut-out.
Waste Not, Want Not!
I don’t like wasting and prefer recycling scraps and bits of unused paper and leftover paints or ink from artwork I have done. It’s so much fun figuring out what to do with them to create interesting stuff. Here is the scrap I was talking about; it’s the outer part of a bunny shape I had previously cut out and used for the last two parts of this series. It’s covered in baby pink from a previous attempt at using it as a stencil for a Gelli print. But it’s not going to be scrap anymore! It’ll now be the foreground for a new painting from which the background will be Bunny. This method is otherwise known as “negative space” art, where the subject (in this case Bunny) is created from layering on top. It’s of course a contrast to “positive space” art, in which one would directly draw or paint the subject (in this case, again, Bunny) onto paper or canvas.
Printing the Background
This background is a result of an experiment using acrylic ink and fluid paint for Gelli printing! I used Canson’s Mixed Media paper (300 gsm) for this and firstly primed it with white Gesso since the surface is quite bumpy. Once dry, I squeezed various blue colours of the ink onto a large rectangle Gelli plate and spread them with a brayer. Then I realised that the colours were so fluid and liquid that they wouldn’t adhere to the Gelli plate as I was hoping they would. Haha but I thought I’d see what would happen if I print them on paper. And here it is! I think it made a very interesting pattern, if not a very pretty one. I love how the various blues merge together without creating a messy mix.
Negative Space is Cool!
Whilst waiting for the blue acrylic inks to dry, I rolled on with a brayer some pink paint (mixed with some fluorescent pink High Flow Acrylic) on the edges of the scrap stencil piece to make it all pink. And once everything was dry, I trimmed the scrap to the same size as the paper which has the blue acrylic print on. Then I carefully glued the pink scrap stencil paper on top of it with my Japanese rice glue and flattened it all with some heavy books on top so the painting doesn’t warp. Doesn’t Bunny look cool in that melange of blue?
Now I knew that the position of the Bunny would be a bit skewed to the left and that there would be some empty space. Problem solved by filling it in with a pile of little Easter eggs using rubber stamps and Distress Oxide (Picked Raspberry) on the left bottom corner. Then I created a border on the left by dotting in some pink Nuvo Crystal Drops and added some sparkles using pink glitter glue around the eggs and across the bottom of the piece. And here it is now!! Looks like Bunny is out to sea enjoying this beautiful day!
I enjoyed creating this piece because I don’t get to do much negative space art and was curious as to how it would all turn out. Turned out better than I had expected! And using scrap paper to recreate something kawaii made me feel proud. Since I have a Sizzix die cut machine, it would be a good chance to use it more often to create similar series like this. So watch out for this space!
My Kawaii Quarter 