The previous owner of our new house left us with a beautiful garden. So many pretty flowers including violets and roses in vibrant colors. Having been raised in a high rise apartment block in Tokyo, I never had the luxury of a garden let alone be surrounded by a lot of green! I therefore never learned to garden nor took any interest in it. But now! You don’t appreciate having to look after a beautiful garden until you actually own one. Luckily my boyfriend is a keen gardener and knows quite a lot about flowers and nature. And so my next project in life is to learn to garden from him!
A Leisurely Start
I was then inspired to paint some flowers with the limited materials I had in my new home, as rest of the stuff sits in the other house. How about some abstract illustration of flowers? And in watercolor? On my sketchbook (Strathmore’s Visual Journal for Watercolors), I doodled some flowers first in primary colors. Winsor & Newton”s pan of watercolors was used along with a brush pen. At this stage I had no plans as to what to do with the painting but was just “jotting down” whatever was on my mind!
Adding Green
No garden is complete without green, I figured. As such I decided to paint the background with a variety of green shades from my Kuretake SAI watercolor pens which were spread with my water pen brush. Then I dotted in the leaves around various areas.
Layers of Flowers
Still looking a bit dull and plain, I went ahead and added more and more flowers. I used a variety of markers and mediums including Ecoline markers, gel pens and India-ink based Faber Castell’s Pitt Artists Pens, using light touches. As the initial layer is watercolor-based, I was careful not to smudge or move the colors below.
Happy Flowers
I just felt like scribbling some smiley faces on the flowers to cheer the mood up more. Let’s make the garden kawaii as well as beautiful! With my numerous gel pens, I went about adding the faces as well as doodling more flowers and squiggles around the painting where I thought empty areas could be filled in. And now I think I could consider this done!
Well, for now I am done, but who knows, in a few months I may want to add more! Perhaps draw Little One in the painting or include some cute animals or just more flowers. That’s the thing about starting with doodles; you can just go on and on. For now, I’ll consider myself content with it and focus on learning to garden and keep it beautiful AND find more inspiration for my art work!
My Kawaii Quarter 