Back to Juliette Crane‘s Whimsical Animals! online classes! This unit is about Creating a Whimsical Rabbit which I couldn’t wait to begin as rabbits indeed are one of my favorite animals, let alone drawing about. And who doesn’t like a cute little bunny?
The Background
And quoting Juliette, “in this project we’re going to create a heavily collaged and colorful background and then add two characters.” How exciting is that! And here is my collaged backround on my 30cm x 40cm canvas board. A random mixture of wrapping papers, Japanese newspaper bits, paper napkins and torn out pages from magazines were assembled. As you can see, the area for the face was not covered since we want to avoid the wrinkled effect from the glued collages. Some color blocks with acrylic paint were then piled on, once the paper were dry, to fill in the white spaces. This was then followed by mark-making with water-soluble oil pastels. So far so pretty and colorful!
Bunny Time!
Although I do regularly paint bunnies, this session was not easy at all! I felt mine had to be in proportion and symmetrical this time, especially the ears and eyes. Also, I considered adding the mouth in Miffy-style but changed my mind halfway. The background was further a challenge for me as I hardly use white like Juliette does, but I wanted to try it for myself to achieve that dreamy mood. And it turned out quite amazing, I must say! Quite a bit of negative space painting again, this time for the flowers in the background and part of bunny’s dress. And for the second character, I opted for a tiny bunny rather than an owl. The Mama and Baby theme certainly adds to the kawaii in the painting!
Art Supplies Used
And what mediums did I select here? Quite a wide variety! The main effects came from the colorful and pretty collage papers but the supporting mediums were largely from Golden’s fluid acrylics. Juliette further suggests thining down the paint with acrylic medium to make it sheer when painting over the collages so the layer beneath still shows through. For this, I used Liquitex Gloss Medium. Texture was enhanced with modelling paste for the bunny’s collar and a range of glitter glues.
And what a fun class this was! Always a pleasure to paint with Julliette, as it’s another opportunity to learn new and work beyond my comfort zone. I was able to create this dreamy mood with the white, for instance . In addition, my characters may have not turned out as expected but I ended up love them . Look how cute and adorable my bunnies turned out!
My Kawaii Quarter 