I recently got myself a triangle brush, Princeton Velvetouch Petals No. 8. I watch some tutorial videos on Youtube on how to use it. At first, it was a bit disorienting, but I got the hang of it and it is actually quite easy. It makes these fluffy florals like carnations. Other types are also possible like loose roses and five petal flowers.
Here showing you my finished work. I made a simple bouquet from it and also, I filmed it so you can try it too!
Sunflowers are some of my favorite flowers. I love them together with roses! Today, I felt like practicing on flower angles so I'm doing a bunch of sunflower stems facing slightly sideways and facing up to make them look more realistic.
I started with the buri pouch. I drew a bit of guide lines using pencil but I actually really don't like much doing it. I like to paint directly but sometimes there really needs to be a guide so I don't make mistakes in my composition. I am more spontaneous when I paint. It's not really the best practice because usually you'll need to plan out your painting but I dunno, I just really want to skip the sketching most times.
I used the acryl gouache, which dries out pretty quickly so I had to work a little faster while I filmed it. I had some leftover paint so I grabbed a watercolor pad and painted more sunflowers. When I'm working on acrylic or any paint that dries, I feel a lot time pressured and I really hate that. Gladly, this one was done quickly. I like this speckled background style, I think I will be adding this to more future paintings.
This is something I did to combine calligraphy and art. It was quite a fun project and my letter A turned our really well. I'm actually really fond of doing galaxy artworks because the blending of colors are so fascinating and pretty much not so hard to do.
I'd say it all starts to come together when I added the stars. I'm planning on adding more letters soon!
This is another practice on flowers, this time I did in purple. In particular, I'm trying to get better at perspective painting of the petals. Sometimes they could face sideways, or slightly facing down. I'd really like to get a better and easier way of painting them.
As I filmed this, I didn't realize the camera was off focus so as you will see in my process video, it's blurred out for the first few seconds.
Here are notebooks I painted using Turner Acryl Gouache. They're as great as people say they are. The paints are very opaque and painting was a breeze. I used them to make cover artworks for these mini notebooks, with names in calligraphy.
A friend recently went to South Korea where autumn leaves are falling and brought back for me these maple leaves from Nami Island! They're so pretty! I may put them in a nice frame in the future but for now I'm keeping them. So it was the perfect idea to paint them one Sunday afternoon! These are actually some of my favorite colors to use, darker shades of red, green and yellow.
My faves below would be the yellow and dark red leaves, lower left and lower center. Showing you my actual desk situation (it's not neat, I know), and the finished illustration!
Sharing this as my first time to use gouache on canvas and I'm so happy with the result! If watercolor and acrylic had a a child, it would be gouache. It's not as popular as watercolor but I love working with it especially that I've always had a love/hate relationship with acrylic. I want to use it more often!
This piece is a gift for Mary Lauren's first birthday. What better way to celebrate life than with flowers!
By the way, I also tried it on black painted wood. Needed to reapply another coat to keep it opaque. But overall it's great. I feel my brush "freer" with gouache.
I'm getting back to painting some plain native bags I purchased from the holidays. Aside from the usual roses, I'm trying out sunflowers and some white petal flowers for some variety. The small shoulder bags are wonderful and cute but they're not always available in local shops. So I looked for other types and found these lovely clutch bags from Subida.
I love that they're quite roomy and I like the fact that they came in other colors aside from the natural one. The weave patterns are great and they add more texture to the color and design that I added. Another cute find is the round hand bag which I also have kept one for myself because it's my favorite from all of them! And I don't have a lot so each bag is special and unique.
Here I also share the other bags I painted and sold over the holidays. I'm so happy with these because they came out pretty! The bag texture makes the designs look different, in a good way. They went so well with florals and leaves!
If you want to see how I painted them, I have a post about it and was able to film while painting. You can view it here.
This project started out as an entry to a contest turned collaboration project sponsored by Inspiredby.ph in which I was invited to participate, to paint a calligraphy design on a ukelele. The theme was "Reasons we love the Philippines" and I chose the theme of the beach for obvious reasons.
I painted on two ukeleles, one of a simple artwork, bird's eye view of beaches and another includes calligraphy design with Filipino words of beach scenery.
The "drone" view of the beach artwork is inspired by the palette knife paintings of Sally West. For the calligraphy piece are words written in Filipino that remind us of the ideal beach scenes.
I take you through my process of painting through these photos.
Here is another simple floral painting of a floral arrangement only using 2-3 colors. This is something I'm practicing on since I am used to using a lot of colors in a bouquet. Here, I'm using my seldom-used filbert brush in painting the petals. It takes some getting used to but for the petals, it seems easier to achieve wider shapes. There's also a speed painting video of this artwork below, if you wish to see the process.
I was looking for an alternative to artist's tape and found out I could use washi tape instead. I tried it out on a scrap of paper and was happy to see it worked! So I decided to do a proper painting.
I prepared a 7x5 inch ready-cut watercolor paper and made a grid of twelve blocks, 4 columns and 3 rows. I painted these landscapes and galaxy scapes, some sea scapes and one or two sunsets. It was really fun to do, as they're smaller than the usual size I work with.
After paintng, I was so excited while peeling off the tape. And well, it did not disappoint! The mini's look really great up close. Better than expected. Now I'm wondering if I can do one with flowers.
This reminds me so much of Loraine Loots' Painting for Ants which I absolutely adore. I'm so awed by her talent and her work. She paints very small round paintings of everything in great detail!
So here is my own versiono of painting tiny art. Supplies I used are listed below:
This is a commissioned artwork to be made as a cover for a scrapbook for a group of med students. This took more time and effort than most of my previous work since I had to draw before I paint. I usually avoid drawing first if I can get away with it because the pencil strokes couldn't be erased when it's been painted over. This one's a bit more complicated to paint directly.
It's been fun to make this and a good thing that I filmed while painting because I had to redo the whole thing and resorted to graphic design tools and resources. Client had further changes after artwork was already done.
I'm posting the video at the bottom of this post if you want a preview of how I did the painting process.
Painting watermelon slices are so easy, even children can do it! Here I did a pattern for a bookmark. Just some eye candy to add to that nice book I'm reading.
I tried drawing my friends to see if I could really do portraits that resemble them. I started with painting on paper but I could never get it right so I adjust the paintings in Photoshop. It takes forever to do finish one portrait because I struggle at getting the facial characteristics right.
I think I got some of them right but I feel it's too energy consuming if I keep making these. But here they are.
Bookmarks are simple things we take for granted, but you never really feel how much you need it when you need to mark your progress in a book (a real one with covers and pages and wonderful book smell).
I've also been curious about gouache, mainly because I found some amazing illustrators on Instagram who use gouache as their medium. Gouache is water based paint, much like watercolor, but more opaque. If acrylic and watercolor had a baby, it would be gouache.
So I decided to try its opacity on kraft paper. I would normally have several layers of paint if I had used watercolors but this only got me using a few strokes. Great! I'm loving it already!
The white pen I used to write the quote is by Sakura. It's a great pen. As you will see in the video, it went smoothly in opaque white while I wrote on blue gouache finish.
I did a video while painting this, to add content to my youtube channel. That video is found at the bottom of this post.
Materials for this project are as follows:
- Kraft card (Muse paper Japan, 230g)
- Marie's Gouache Colour
- Silver Black Velvet #8 brush
- Generic #9 brush from Daiso
- Sakura Gelly Roll 08 (White)
I made a second bookmark, on white watercolor paper. I messe it up when I started writing the quote using calligraphy pen, so I cut off about 1cm from the top and rewrote the quote with pigment ink drawing pen.
