First Anniversary!

Oops, my BF and I completely forgot that yesterday was our first anniversary of legal partnership! Known as “Samenleving” in Dutch, we became official live-in partners a year ago yesterday. It’s quite common in the Netherlands for couples to sign a Cohabitation Agreement which gives the same legal rights and obligations as a married couple but without all the hassles of wedding ceremonies. Embarrassingly enough, it was not until I was reminded of it when coming across the Memories section on Facebook! We both just laughed about it which made it all the more fun about being together. And now I just found a perfect painting I had been working on for our First Anniversary to make up for the slip up!

Pencil Sketch

I’m really getting into this digital art. When I’m not painting analog due to busy schedule and wanting to relax in the evenings, my iPad and Procreate app are a godsend. Days are also getting shorter in this neck of the woods, and by as early as 15:30, it gets dark and more difficult to paint without proper natural light. Here, I decided to do a painting of me and my boyfriend together for a change, and with no particular objective to the piece, went about sketching with a 6B pencil. Just a rough sketch, and so far so cute!

Color Us Beautiful!

As medium, I went for Square Dry Inker, adjusting opacity and brush size as appropriate. The blending tool was also used where needed. One of the things I learned when filling in color is to add a separate layer from the pencil sketch and move it UNDERNEATH so the outlines are still visible and clean. As seen below, I started with the heads, followed by the outfits. For each area, such as my eyes, his eyes, my hair, his hair, my outfit, his outfit, etc., I incorporated separate layers in case I wanted to resize or reposition any part. Once I was happy with how it all looked in the end, I merged the layers. Further recommended is before merging the layers, it may be an idea to make a duplicate of your work first as it is not possible to unmerge once the deed is done. That way, if you realise you need to go back, you have a spare copy of your work!

The Background!

I usually do the background first before deciding on the subject, but this time I did the opposite. One of the wonderful things about digital art is that you have the flexibility to choose, since with analog painting it is advisable to do the background first to save you the trouble of having to paint around the subject without making it look disjointed. For the background, I played around with a variety of texture brushes and stamps as well as splatters and lines. Another thing I also experimented with was the background color, which is the bottom layer. Having tried and tested different shades, I decided that this pretty emerald green would work the best. And I thought I was complete and left it as that until… I decided to use this for our anniversary theme!

Adding Bling

Black Friday last week, and I got some offers on the Creative Market webshop for Procreate brushes add-ons. Two of the sets that appealed to me were the Gold Rush and Lights brushes; the first one adds some metallic and glitter to your work whilst the second one makes your work pop out more with the neon and firey elements. Seeing that it’s almost Christmas, I thought that they would be cool to have. And I do love adding some bling in my work anyhow for fun! I then spread some gold foils and splatters of green glitter in the background. The hearts were further traced over with some of the Neon light brushes. This time, I left the outfits alone and decided that it is the background which should give the celebratory mood. And here we are now!

And once again, digital art is also a lot of fun! I actually enjoy both analog and digital, as having variety makes it even more interesting. The possibilities are also endless as I discover more and learn to get more creative. And now from an existing piece, I recreated that into a cute painting to commemorate our “forgotten” First Anniversary! And for the next year, we hope to be able to remember and then I could fully prepare for another painting of us again!