Bear Costume

Little One loves the warmer weather and dressing up too! The other day, she visited a children’s theme park and got inspired by a cute bear costume. You know the sort I mean: those big heads you place on your own head along with a matching costume. Little One then decided to create her own for fun, using recycled cloth and paper. Now what a talented little girl she is. Those big blue eyes, and the beautiful colorful dress!

From Leftover Paint

And of course I had to paint about this. It actually all started from some leftover paint! Not wanting to waste, I typically like to smudge any excess paint from my brush onto a blank page of another sketchbook, then develop it into another artwork. What a resourceful way to recycle and get creative! And here is what my recycled page looked like:

Building Layers

I began randomly adding on this page, layer after layer, although I did leave some white spaces. A variety of acrylic ink and paint were introduced, along with some scrap collage papers like origami and wrapping paper (yes recycling!) and stenciled flower patterns. Always fun to play around with different mediums! Once I was ready, I roughly sketched in our character with some black charcoal pencil.

Developing the Painting

I covered the background with some Fluid Acrylic by Golden. Teal and Titanium White for the sky, and a combination of Sap Green and Green Gold for the ground. For the face and hands I went for the white. A bit of a negative space here emerged with the ears and the dress. Realizing I had accidentally forgotten the arms, I merely added them in! She is wearing a sleeveless dress, right?

Finishing Her Up

More details added, especially in the sky as I felt it could do some more. I used the stencil again for the yellow flowers and dotted in some fluorescent red. For the first time, I experimented with some foil candy wrappers, and I think it worked rather well with the green ones! The eyes were then painted in, and this time I made them blue to match the blue on the ears. Seeing that the costume could be more elaborate, I glued on bits of origami paper adorned with some pretty flowers, and incorporated some bling with glitter glue on the eyelashes and the ear. Unfortunately, the glitter is not very visible in the photos. Some doodles with a white Molotow marker, and we’re now good to go!

And what fun this was! I enjoy the challenge of developing paintings from the unknown. It all started with a page of leftover paint and as layers were added on and various mediums were played around with, we came up with this cute painting! And now, looks like Little One enjoyed dressing up as a big bear. She even mentioned about making a cat version of the costume!