Evening Glow

Little One is back again! Sharing with you another fun mixed media painting I made whilst following another of Juliette Crane’s fun painting class. This time, I created a night theme in which Little One is in her garden enjoying the full moon! How sweet is that.

The Background

From Juliette’s Serendipity I class, I followed the lesson is called Strengthening Your Style. The objective is “to go back to finding inspiration in our own past work, but taking these favorites further to really develop a unique style to make it our own” as Juliette quotes. And that’s exactly what I did! We normally start by creating a background where we play around with various mediums at hand. As for me, I smeared with my fingers random blobs of paint on a sheet of A3 Mixed Media paper by Cansons. A variety of paints was used including some jars of Dylusions brown and purple, Amsterdam Acrylics in pink and blue, Ara’s Neon Orange and Senellier’s Neon Red.

Then for the second layer, some yellow paint was smeared on top along with collages of pink and green wrapping tissues. It was here that Juliette introduced us to another brilliant idea. Self-made stencils! Just take any scrap paper and cut out holes of shapes you like then stipple on some thick paint over it. Here as you can see, I created some tear-drop shapes and incorporated them with some red, later adding some white to make some pink. So far so cool!

Adding Little One

I purposely left the middle of the paper relatively free of dark colors or collages as I will be adding my character: Little One! Slightly emulating Juliette, I added another collage, this time a round circle on the top left corner cut out from a paper napkin illustrating pumpkins. I was thinking of creating the sun with it. Meanwhile, I sketched Little One with some black marking pencil and once happy with the position of her, I painted her face with the usual blend of titanium white and quinacridone azo nickel gold. The hair was then drawn with some brown oil pastel once the paint was dry, followed by sketching the eyes with the marking pencil. As for the sun, I colored that in with some gold.

Finishing Up

Instead of the sun, though, I decided that this gold circle would be the moon because I wanted to enhance the gold. A night theme was then created by covering the sky area with some Ultramarine Blue (Golden Fluid Acrylic). However, I didn’t want to lose those cute stencilled teardrop shapes and their colorful surroundings and thus by negative space painting, those tear-drops became falling leaves! For the ground, I used some Sap Green Hue (also by Golden) and made sure it blended well with the Ultramarine Blue. The same negative space also applied to LIttle One’s dress because I really loved the colors so much. Then the hair and eyes were filled in with some Antelope Brown, followed by some black glitter pen for the lashes. As final touch, white was used for the eyes and collar with a bit dotted in the sky to resemble stars. And now!

Once again, what fun that was painting along with Juliette’s classes! Always wonderful to pick up new ideas (the self-made stencils) and develop techniques. It also gave me the opportunity to play around with various paints which have been hiding in the drawers for ages and need to be used. With the objective of this lesson being strengthening my own style and developing it to something unique, I am pretty confident I managed that! LIttle One and all the other kawaii characters are so fun to work with.

Click here for more about Juliette Crane and her amazing classes!