Magical Garden

And now another kawaii art journal spread! As the summer approaches, our garden gets greener and greener everyday with all the pretty flowers blossoming! We are so excited about this new magical garden in our dream house. Hiring a gardener to plant the flowers and relocate some existing plants was certainly worth it. Now we are enthusiastically maintaining it on a daily basis, although there are a few finishing touches to be made. A quick share now then of a painting I made the other day on my sketchbook!

How it Started

One of the purposes of an art journal is experimenting and playing around with various mediums and trying out different things. Recently, I purchased some bottles of Liquitex acrylic inks in metallic shades and decided to put the silver one to the test for fun. Just brushed on same random streaks across the pages. Loved it! And now why not combine it with my favorite shade, fluorescent pink, by filling it in the empty spaces? Now that’s pretty…

Gouache Painting

I’ve always wanted to paint with gouache on top of an acrylic background. Holbein’s Acryla Gouache was introduced here, although they are not strictly gouache due to their high acrylic content and hence water resistant. Traditional gouache is actually water-soluble. Nevertheless Acryla equally gives a matte and chalky finish and a thick opaque appearance, working well on top of acrylic. As you can see, I’ve started with painting us first, and as I was pleased with how we turned out, I proceeded in adding flowers. A variety of surrounding flowers and plants were then sketched with pencils. So far so kawaii!

Further Painting

Another beauty of gouache is the vibrancy of the colors enhanced by its opacity and matte finish. Here I went for scarlet red, fluorescent red, icy green, emerald green and even some iridescent purple to demonstrate how the colors pop out. Metallic pen was finally used to draw the eyelashes, and with some Ranger’s Stickles glitter glue I carefully scribbled “LOVE”. Et voilà!

And what a kawaii little painting that turned out to be! I’m pleased to see how gouache on acrylic works so well and will definitely be doing that again. With summer on the way and flowers abound, now is a good chance to create more cute and colorful paintings. And enjoy our amazing magical garden!