And now I’m back home, after a week of Tracy Verdugo‘s abstract painting retreat in Montelparo, Italy. And what am inspiring and fun one it was! As mentioned in my last blog, it’s my second one with her, the last being in Cambodia five years ago, I always enjoyed her classes on-line too, and although the start of the course is a repeat from the previous, it is good to refresh our skills and more importantly, observe how much we’ve both developed over the years. On the first day, we started the morning with a warm-up and some mark-making exercises.
A variety of mediums were used but mainly acrylic ink. Tracy introduced us to various ways to apply them and combine with other mediums like soluble oil pastels, crayons, gouache, markers, colored pencils. Nothing new to me, but as I don’t get to work with huge 18″x24″ much, I did struggle with how to fill the spaces up and got stuck occasionally. Nevertheless Tracy reminded me to work with contrasting pairs (dark and light, straight and undulating, thick and thin, angular and round and so forth). And eventually I began introducing my cute little characters like Little One to bring on the kawaii elements.
Not sure if I’d consider this piece a painting per se, as it was merely a warm-up session but I do like how it turned out. Everything randomly all over the place with the anonymous cute characters floating around in between. Perhaps I might still continue working on it another time in future and develop it into a proper painting, but for now I’ll just call this my Montelparo Medley!
My Kawaii Quarter 