It is March 2024, and Little One is in London! And why London? Well, there was a Kawaii Exhibition at the Somerset House on the Embankment featuring our favorite character, Hello Kitty! Naturally, she wanted to go see it and of course bring her little friends along. And how sweet, she hired a red double decker bus, stuck a Hello Kitty banner and drove them to this exciting event. And what fun it was! Her friends were very excited and enjoyed the adventure, thoroughly impressed how Little One could maneuver such a huge bus around crowded London!
The Inspiration
After a sketchbook doodle in Adventures in London during my trip to London last March, I thought I would expand on the double decker bus part and make a painting out of it. The photo of my doodle was cropped, imported on Procreate and traced on. This time, I added Little One as the driver and switched some of the characters by the windos to enhance the kawaii.
Color Them Beautiful
So here I went about filing in the colors with my Medium Airbrush. Challenge was getting different colors of the characters to somewhat match one another and not look too clashed and chaotic. Avoided including red in any of them as well as I wanted to enhance the color of this iconic double-decker bus and of course Hello Kitty’s ribbon. And hopefully the red I chose is close enough to the original London bus!
Background and Details
And now time to figure out what to do with the background. Nothing too detailed or we distract the bus from being centerpiece but an empty background would be boring and look as if the bus is floating in the air! So how about just ground and sky? Experimented with a few watercolor brushes like Salamanca for the ground and Paintimg Fresco for the sky. Now we’re talking! After that some textures were introduced on the tires, steering wheel and inside the bus. Et voilà!
What fun that was! Just as fun as what Little One and her friends were having riding that bus. Although this sort of illustration may be most effective on digital painting, I would be curious to try painting it on paper or even better canvas. It’s too cute to pass! Definitely on my bucket list of painting ideas…
My Kawaii Quarter 