Back in September, I had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed and featured in Carmel June "CJ" Saga's vlog series "Galleria 6200". This series includes brands and small business that are located in Dumaguete City ranging from arts, crafts, food, culture and more.
We shot the interview at a friend's house in Valencia, Negros Oriental. The day was a lot of fun. They took photos and clips of some of my work, we had a quick demonstration on painting loose flowers and calligraphy. After the shoot, we sat and exchanged fun stories.
This video premiered in her Youtube channel on November 29, 2020.
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!
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 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.
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.
In the mood for painting and decided to put new content to my Youtube channel. I have kept one where I occasionally post process videos of simple paintings and crafts I've done. I'm going to leave a link to that below, in case you want to check that out.
Here is the finished painting. For this artwork, I used ShinHan watercolors, a no. 3 round brush I bought from Sekaido. It's a generic brush named after the shop but I find it works pretty good. For the paper, I used a Daler Rowney Aquafine 300 gsm col pressed paper. It works ok for some artworks, sometimes I don't like how wet edges look when they're dry. It's 100% cellulose which means it's not cotton. But I like the color and the texture of this paper.
One of the things that inspired me this year is videography and short films. I don't know the technicalities of film-making but i try to learn from those wonderfully created by professionals or genius amateurs online. This is only my third video project from back in 2012. I love how it's written. I chose a paraphrased version of the poem so it's easier to relate to. The clips aren't a lot, though. I had only one trip to the beach and i wish i had more varied scenes to shoot.
