Yup looks like the deal for the sale of my Amsterdam apartments fell through. It’s a long story but we will be putting them on the market again. What waste of time that all was, anticipating the sale, collecting the money and putting it all behind me. But the show must go on. All I can say is that I hope I have better luck the next time, and now I need to focus on the future. Keep my mind off the bad experience by improving further our present house, tidying up, gardening, working out and of course painting! And what better way than to paint Little One praying for us.
Starting with Leftover Paint
Whenever I am painting, I typically use a page from a sketchbook (or another piece of paper) as a palette to test or mix paint and also wipe any excess. That is then used to recreate another painting rather than throwing it away. Waste not want not! Sometimes I even have an idea what I want to do with it like paint a character so I deliberately keep the middle area clear from dark colors and in this case, smear some white paint if I have any/ And here is what I started with:
Developing the Painting
I then randomly piled on some more paint, and as you can see below I introduced some pink and blue. And some torn pieces of polka-dotted wrapping paper were glued on as collages. Looks a bit overwhelming but we shall see what happens next. And now time to paint my character! A circle was cut out on some scrap newspaper, glued on and then painted on to be the face. With a black marking pencil, I roughly sketched my idea of what I wanted: Little One standing on the field with butterfly and sun in the background!
Adding More
Once I had a better idea of my painting, I created the sky by painting around the butterfly and sun, and further colored the ground first in yellow but as I didn’t like it, I layered on top with teal. The negative space effect is looking great! Hair was painted in, followed by gluing some torn bits of green wrapping tissue for some atmosphere. So far so cute!
Finishing Off
Once I was happy with the background, all I did was fill in the subjects and add details. I made the robe various shades of pink, the butterfly gold and the sun orange. Sennelier’s 3D Liners and glitter glue were then used to add some texture. What is important here is being able to pair the colors in opposite areas of the page so that the painting has some unity. For instance, the fluorescent pink on the butterfly matches the bottom of Little One’s robe, the orange sun and the orange tulips and so forth. The final touch was the trio of sequins on the forehead. I always feel sequins and glitter add to the cuteness. And here we go!
What fun I had with this! I am very pleased with this painting. It is so much fun recreating from some random palette of leftover paint and seeing what we can come up with. There is quite a lot of harmony too with the painting namely with the color scheme. Furthermore, I love how bright and vivid the shades turned out, radiating some positive energy which I certainly need during these difficult moments. Painting this piece certainly cheered me up, and I will definitely be creating more fun colorful work like this!
My Kawaii Quarter 