Still in France now on vacation but with the heavily rainy day we decided to just stay in the apartment and chill! Great opportunity to catch up on non-work stuff within the limits of my iPad including my backlog of blogs about my past artworks. Today I’m sharing here a mixed-media I was working on a few weeks ago. One of those days I wasn’t feeling inspired and decided to created something intuitively on my sketchbook. It’s all about flowers today!
The Beginning
As it’s been quite some time touching my acrylic inks, I decided to have a little play with them. Sketchbook was Strathmore’s Visual Journal Bristol Paper (A4). Started wetting portions of the page with a large wide brush before scattering some yellow, yellow-green and turquoise ink with droppers. And look how cool that effect is! On other areas, I drew some flower shapes with the droppers and spread the colors outwards with a wet brush. Bits of torn paper napkins were then glued on in random areas of the page.
Getting Crafty
I was in an experimental mood that day and decided to have a go with reintroducing some craft tools I hadn’t used for ages including stencils and rubber stamps. Having selected 3 different colors from my Amsterdam acrylic paints in red, blue and pink, I set about blending them to produce a bespoke purple shade and proceeded in stenciling. Alas it didn’t come out as I was hoping but then again we can work on it by introducing other interesting stuff around it. How about some rubber stamps and Ranger’s Distress Oxide inks? Despite coming out a bit messy I doodled some flowers with a metallic gel pen in hope of distracting us from my “beautiful mistakes”.
Introducing Texture
And now comes the fun part! How about some bling and enhancing the kawaii element to this painting? Simply experimented with the various sparkles and glitter including Stickes by Rangers, liners by Marabu etc. Then came up with a bright idea to have ago with another craft tool: some punchers! Got a few flower-shaped ones and hence made a few cutouts on some origami paper as I love their patterns. A few here and there, and now I think I’m done!
And what fun that was! So wonderful to go back to painting intuitively again, just playing by ear what to create with no plans in mind. Another is that I got to come back to some of the mediums I hadn’t touched for some time, especially the craft tools. They need to be reintroduced and practiced with more often! And you know that apart from kawaii characters, I do enjoy painting flowers, right? And as it’s soon going to be fall, I’m going to miss having flowers in my garden…
My Kawaii Quarter 