Now back to following Juliette Crane‘s Whimsical Animals on-line classes! This next unit is Covering Up a Background You Don’t Like. The point of this exercise is to work over a background to create something else. And I of course turned mine to another cat! How about a Calico cat for a change? Still a naughty little one of course. And how cute, she is surrounded by pink fish because she must be hungry!
The Background
One of Juliette’s suggestion was to find any painting you had been working on but ended up not liking and considering disposing of or keeping for a “paint over” opportunity. As I couldn’t find any myself, I ended up creating my own background for the purpose of this unit. Random blocks of color were applied using my fingertips with a range of paint and collage tissues on a small square 20×20 cm canvas. I actually ended quite liking my background though, but the show must continue…
Away We Cover Up
After sketching my cat with a water-soluble black Stabilo pen, we start covering up the background with Shiva oil paint sticks. Juliette uses black here but I decided to try out Payne’s Grey instead and love this night time effect! As for the cat, I firstly filled the colored areas in with two shades of orange India Inks then some Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold acrylic paint. Eyes were a combination of acrylic, India ink and oil paint sticks. At the last minute, I decided to introduce some fish in the background to make the painting more cute and interesting. Bright pink was chosen to compliment the green eyes and the yellow moon. And as usual I love introducing texture to my paintings! Glass Beads for the cat’s furry collar, transparent glitter glue for the whiskers, more glitter for the moon and some Clear Tar Gel for the extra gloss to eyes. And here we are!
Mediums Used
As you can see, quite an extensive range of mediums were used for this painting. The paints on the top left of the photo are what I used for the background. The colored India Inks are from Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bombay Ink. Acrylic paints vary in grade including Ranger’s, Sennelier, Old Holland, Golden and Holbein’s, As Juliette uses Shiva Oil Paint Sticks in her work, I too like to experiment with it and am still learning. Glitter and shimmer come from Cosmic Shimmer, Art by Marlene and Turner’s gouache from Japan. It has indeed been some time since using texture mediums like glass beads and tar gel and I forgot how effective they are. I should use them more often!
Although this painting took a few days to complete, I very much enjoyed it! The only issue was having to wait at least 24 hours for the oil sticks to dry before painting over it. Still, a very informative lesson from which I once again learned new and created new. And I love how my Calico cat turned out, especially surrounded by the pink fish! Now cute is that. Look forward to the next unit!
My Kawaii Quarter 