Whilst taking our weekend break and taking the boat in the daytime the past two days, we came across quite a few animals along the way. Many of them are wild or from farms or in the case of dogs, pets of owners living along the waterway in the wetlands. Lots of birds, ducks, cows, horses lambs and dogs. But no cats! “I wonder why,” I lamented to my boyfriend. When we returned, he had to go to the gas station to refill the tank for the boat. He came back with a surprise for me. A photograph of a cat he came across on the way back and took with his phone! So cute, it was a kawaii orange one sitting in the middle of the field staring right out. So cats hang out the fields looking for mice, I figured, but they also don’t like water so you don’t see them appearing by the wetlands…
Intuitive Thoughts
I was going to paint about that above thought at some point. First I was practicing drawing some cows on my sketchbook and once done, I grabbed my iPad and began scribbling away. I was in the mood of scribbling about nature as influenced by our boat rides and also wanted to experiment with the Procreate app again particularly for the nature effects like water and trees. It was purely by chance that I decided in the end to make it a piece about the kitty.
The doodling was also another experiment about layers and how they work digitally. And so I went about various mediums and effects layer by layer:
- Layer 1 (top left on above photo): Wet acrylic on white background
- Layer 2 (top right): Flicking or dripping paint
- Layer 3 (bottom left): Water elements
- Layer 4 (bottom right): Wood elements (bamboo and hessian)
- Layer 5 (below photo): Retro effects (flowers and bubbles etc)
Trying out Negative Space
Once I felt I had enough of doodling and scribbling as well as feeling I wasn’t getting anywhere, I decided to either paint my subject(s) on top or instead create a negative space piece. Recently, I’ve been using my iPad to draft my negative space work using photographs of my painting, remember? I have never done this with my Procreate artwork so I thought why not give it a try here?
I then added my final layer and through trial and error began painting with purple acrylic paint of guess what…. a cat! Interesting that was one of the first that came to mind apart from flowers. I enthusiastically painted the cat and once I was happy with it, I added the eyes where the paint drips were. Finally with a white gel pen, I doodled in some flowers to embellish the painting a bit.
Now that was another quick and easy painting I made tonight! Obviously I don’t have to worry about making a mess with paints or inks or cleaning up which is why it takes shorter time. I think the negative space experiment worked well also digitally. That is good to keep in mind as I would most definitely like to do more negative space work again here. And of course I am most happy because painting this kawaii cat more than accounted for me not being able to see any during this trip!
My Kawaii Quarter 