Christmas Together

Another Christmas coming up with restrictions again. Well, we’re not going anywhere and celebrations are likely to be subdued, but BF and I will be spending a cozy one together the two of us. How sweet! And as such here is a little art journal painting I made in between projects. Recently, I bought myself an art journal book by Strathmore precisely for Mixed Media. Paper is 190gsm which is good enough for journaling I suppose. To see what interesting stuff I could come up with, this particular painting is based on only water-soluble mediums including watercolor, brush pens, aquarelle pencils and oil pastels such as Neocolor and Faber Castell’s Gelatos. Let’s get started!

Starting Out

As you can see here, I made a rough drawing using some mini watercolor pans. Jane Davenport, for one, has some amazingly bright shades which I like to try out. These are colors that you hardly see in many of the professional palettes. So of course, I went for a Christmas theme by chance, featuring me and my boyfriend! A festive mood was sought after, and hence for fun I opted for getting our hair purple.

Then the Background

Whilst it’s customary to paint the background first, there is no hard and fast rules. The main reason people do it is so that the background and subjects don’t look disjointed. In this case, I wasn’t too bothered by it as it’s a rough doodle. The set of Faber Castell’s Gelatos in “Bright” was used for the background in that yellow-green shade. I also thought it would be an idea to further enhance the pink in the dress too! As for the Christmas tree and heart, I went over it with the green gelato. A thin wash of water was then applied over it to spread the color a little bit. Personally, I like it without diluting it with water and leaving it waxy which is why I went over it again on the trees and the outline of the heart.

Finish Up

I continued using water-soluble mediums for the finishing touches. And here I used Kuretake ZIG Clean Colors which are like markers but are brush pens that can be diluted in water too and used as watercolor. To be honest, I prefer using these as markers rather than paint and hence prefer not to spread the color with water. It is the same with the Gelatos as mentioned above. Aquarelle pencils (Caran d’ache’s Prismalo) were also dabbled with but merely for outlining smaller details such as the eyes. Only a white Uni Posca pen was used for the whites of the eyes. And here is my quick water-soluble sketch!

This exercise was merely to practice with various mediums, more specifically water-soluble ones. And why? Unlike acrylic and oil paints, they are not feasible for layering techniques because obviously the paints will smudge or mix together. Possibilities are hence limited, but then again you can still create some interesting stuff, even layer a bit; pencils, brush markers or gelatos for instance will work well on top of the paint as long as you don’t apply a wet brush. Glad this worked well here, and I would definitely paint more cute stuff like this. Meanwhile, BF and I will prepare another cozy Christmas together!