My Kawaii Quirky Plants

Oh no! I’ve not been able to paint for some time as in the middle of unpacking as just moved to our new house. And I’ve been quite behind with blogging about my work. Lots to catch up on! Not to worry I’ll eventually get there. Hoping to get my art studio sorted soonest and promising myself to spare a few hours each day to get creative with painting and writing!

A Bonus Lesson

Today I’m sharing a cute painting I made whilst following Tracy Verdugo’s Story Painting class. This is a bonus lesson incorporated in Chapter 2 on Quirky Plants. It’s been a month ago but I wanted to wrote about it now before it’s forgotten! Here we practiced painting with a limited number of palettes by mixing colors and figuring out what colors work best together. In other words making the most of what’s available. I used a selection of Fluid Acrylics in five different colors and three shades of gouache as pictured below.

The Mini Backgrounds

On my Strathmore Mixed Media sketchbook, I painted a series of sixteen rectangles each using one stroke with a wide brush but in different shades. This also requires not to wash the brush each time but to continue with another color so they automatically blend together.

Drawing the Plants

So starts the quirky plants! With a small thin brush, I doodled in my plants using the same color palette as the background. The challenge was to create as much variety as possible and as mentioned earlier finding out what colors combine best with each mini background. And here is the first “layer”. Tracy used photos to get inspired and make a more realistic impression of the plants, but I just went for my own imagination as had no photos available so they are more fantasy-inspired!

Making Them Prettier

I decided to go a step further and embellish my plants with glitter glue, gel pens and Nuvo Drops.

Below is a gallery of a closer look of the quirky plants in groups of four. Now you can see all the texture and sparkles.

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This assignment was quite a good break from the more intense ones introduced in the Story Painting class. By makimg the most of the limited color palettes, I was able to learn how to combine and match to create something interesting. Another challenge was using colors I don’t normally use thereby going beyond my comfort zone. A wonderful practice indeed and one I’d definitely try again!

Click here for more on Tracy Verdugo an her amazing classes!