Farewell Summer 2022!

It’s now the beginning of October as we prepare for the colder dreary days and, as we change our clocks back, for shorter daylight! A little painting I made the other day on my sketchbook to put a closure to Summer 2022, one of the last moments for the summer theme of bright colors and flowers everywhere. And here we are standing in the middle of a green field enjoying our walks and making the most of the end of summer dressed elegantly on the way for a romantic evening out!

Ink Sketch

The kawaii drawing was actually quite spontaneous. Whilst working on another piece earlier, I had some excess Sumie Ink leftover in the dish and rather than waste it, I decided to use it all up and grabbed my Strathmore Visual Journal for Watercolor and bamboo reed pen and just scribbled away. It was all impromptu and rather “intuitive”, with the end of the summer in mind featuring me and my boyfriend in Little One forms! How sweet is that.

Using up More Leftover

This painting certainly was about using leftover art supplies too! I had two dishes with some dried up watercolor paint from tubes which I wanted to finish up so as to make room for future fresh paint, ie. making one dish for watercolor and another for gouache only. As such, the sketch was filled in with the leftover paint, starting with the background then the subjects. The grass, however, was colored green with Derwent’s Inktense, a water-soluble medium, since none of the leftover paint had the color I had wanted and there was not sufficient blue or yellow to mix together to make green. The faces were also painted with Inktense. And here is the start:

A Layer of Colored Pencil

As with the previous painting in which I had used Sumie ink, I had to be careful not to smudge it with a wet brush. This meant trying not to touch the ink, resulting in a gap on the edges. Furthermore, I felt that the color could be a bit more intense and less transparent considering how overwhelming the black ink looks. Incorporating colored pencils of matching colors on the edges with a layer on top of the paint seemed a good idea to enhance the painting and make it look more unified. Here, I went for Caran d’Ache’s Pablo which worked really well as the pencils are great quality, and since it’s oil-based (as opposed to also wax-based) the colors come out smoothly and softly, hence the result more intense as we see below. The only parts I skipped the colored pencils were for the sky (I liked the transparency) and the sun (iridescent white). And here goes! So cute, isn’t it?

What a fun experiment that was! Apart from being able to use up all the remaining leftover ink and watercolor, I am happy to have discovered colored pencils as a wonderful tool for enhancing a painting. It now looks much livelier and complete! Gouache is also good, but since I was afraid of ruining the sumie ink sketch by accidently going over it with a wet brush, colored pencils were a less riskier option. I’ll definitely keep that in mind for the future! Meanwhile, I am loving how adorably this painting illustrates us together bidding farewell for the summer. Hope to come up with equally cute and lively ones for the autumn as well!