Little One certainly can’t wait till the spring! And now she’s dreaming of the Spring Paradise surrounded by the leafy green and big bright flowers. She’s even got herself a large pot of plants with huge leaves and pretty tiny pink flowers and whilst balancing it on her head, is counting the days till this dreary winter is over. Hence this vividly Spring-themed painting I made the other day whilst following the next lesson of Juliette Crane’s Serendipity I classes!
The Beginning
What I look forward to about Juliette’s classes is the various ways in which we get started with a painting. We typically begin with the background by playing around with different mediums and methods, layering over and over till we are ready to introduce our character. Even then, the painting evolves as we progress. This lesson, “Adding Whimsy” starts with gluing on some random cut-outs of our favorite shapes from scrap paper onto our substrate before incorporating more collage paper from colored tissue. Whilst Juliette has used an old piece of cardboard paper from a box, I unfortunately had just disposed all my cardboard boxes to recycling so merely replaced that with an A3 sheet from Canson’s Mixed Media sketchbook. Paper wonderfully thick at 300gsm.
Filling in White Space
We then continue with preparing the background by filling in all the blank spaces with blocks of colors and further bits of colored tissue collages. Here I went for Golden Fluid Acrylic in Cobalt Teal, Primary Magenta, Indian Yellow Hue and Titanium White. Some of the teal and yellow got blended by chance, creating a beautiful minty green shade. So far so pretty!
Character Building
I decided to take advantage of the teardrop-like shapes and paint them as leaves. And of course there are those two large flower shapes. The circle on the far right would become the sun, and the elongated semi-circle would be the flower pot. Now I was ready to introduce Little One! I covered up the vertical rectangle in the middle by creating the face with a cut out circle and painting on it. Then the rest followed: Painting the sky with a combination of Cobalt Blue and Phthalo Blue with a bit of white, followed by Sap Green Hue and Permanent Green Light for the ground. The big flowers were then filled in with Light Rose with the dress a darker shade of pink Then the leaves were filled in yellow green. As you can see, some fluorescent pink was lightly dabbed on the dress and flowers in the pot to give brighten up the painting more.
Finishing Up
Not too keen about the dark green ground I brightened it up by some collage of leafy paper napkins before painting over it with the permanent green paint. The eyes were filled in with Molotow paint markers, along with the spiky eyelashes firstly with black glitter marker and then traced over with Ranger’s Stickles in black. For the pot which was originally in Pewter, I went over it in Silver before dabbing on some glitter there as well. The veins of the leaves were drawn with white uni posca markers and where black with marking pencil. And here we go!
Another fun lesson with Juliette! Today was a bit more simple and less intensive than many of her sessions which adds another dimension to the same style of painting. I am also loving the bright vivid colors chosen and using the coming Spring as the theme to prepare for the season and brighten up the winter days Looking forward to the next lesson now! Meanwhile, doesn’t Little One look so adorable in her pink frock and surrounded by all the green and pink flowers?
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My Kawaii Quarter 