This may be the last blog of the decade! And here I wanted to share a cute little painting I completed yesterday. As you know, 2020 marks the Year of the Mouse in the Far East. Some call it Rat but I think mouse sounds cuter, don’t you? And just to make it all the more exciting, I decided to make the most of it with this painting!
Background
This is another intuitive piece which I had so much fun working on. It actually all started with some leftover gold and silver paint I smeared on my sketchpad (Stathmore’s Mixed Media 190gsm). Then I spread some yellow acrylic ink across the page with my fingers before rolling across some gold ink with a brayer. Some pink was also added with bubble wrap imprints.
Getting Mousy
And with this vibrant “bling” pattern in the background and with the coming of the New Year, why don’t I draw some little mice? It’s going to be the Year of the Mouse after all! After a light pencil sketch, I roughly drew a pair of them using my new purple paint (Old Holland’s Cobalt Violet) mixed with some Matt Medium to retain the transparency. Very rough and graffiti-esque yet kawaii!
Just Layer after Layer
The fun part about intuitive painting is that you keep adding one after another. In this painting, I firstly glued on some scrap origami paper on the corner to fill in the space. Then briskly added in Old Holland’s Cyan Blue the “blue sky” with a paintbrush and scraped on some heavy body green acrylic (Golden’s Light Green) in green for the “grass”. Then I really went for the mixed media by stencilling in some green “fireworks”. I myself am not a fan of fireworks because of environmental concerns, and as such, I made these fireworks green! Here, Distressed Oxide in Cracked Pistachio was used which also happened to blend in well with the painting.
And now, what to do with the cute faces of the little mice? I didn’t want to add too much on them so went light handed. This is when acrylic inks get handy as they are thin in consistency yet have a vibrant pigment content. With my finger, I blended some fluorescent pink for the larger mouse, followed by baby pink for the little one. Their outlines were traced over again using the same purple paint. I then added random details like hearts and squiggles using acrylic markers and Sennelier’s Abstract 3D Liner. Oh and I didn’t forget to glue on some cute little teddy bear “charms”!! And here it is!
And here concludes my Kawaii Countdown painting for 2020! It’s so wonderful to stay at home sometimes all warm and toasty in the colder months and just paint away. Excited to continue with more in future too. And now, I, along with Little One and her sweet friends, would like to raise a toast to you all to welcome the new decade and wish you a Prosperous 2020!
My Kawaii Quarter 