Due to my sleep disorder, this painting was done late at night and into the morning.
Here are my paint brushes:
In the end, I used all of these colors, plus a few more.
I started by coating a cradled wood panel with clear gesso and then decided to decoupage the background/underlying skin tone with pink tissue paper.
For the tissue paper, I used “Celebrate It” tissue paper from Michael’s Craft Store in dark pink (Pink), item # 10671678.
I like this brand of tissue paper because it comes in multiple bright colors and is thick enough to decoupage smoothly, without being so thick that it is hard to bind to the cradled wood panel.
Note: When decoupaging my cradled wood panel, I use Golden (or Liquitex) Matte Medium and work in the same way that I learned to decoupage journals, as taught by Jane Davenport. You can find Jane’s art classes on janedavenport.com
I sketched my girl, traced over the pencil with a Pitt Artist Pen 0.5, in Black #199.
On normal paper, this ink usually does not run, but on top of the matte medium, the ink does tend to run. Because of this, I carefully added a layer of Clear Gesso over the lines.
I dried it a bit with a hot air gun and then let it sit for a few hours.
Next, I painted the hair and then started playing around with the skin tone.
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to paint “splotchy ” bright colors or my usual “more realistic” type of skin tone.
You can see below my painting evolution.
A little while later, I arrived at this version.
I was very happy with this version, and I decided that she was done!
As you can see, I opted to add a second earrings, but I kind of wish that I had left it as just one earring.
Recently, I’ve been keeping a list of all the colors I use for each painting.
This way, if I wonder exactly which colors I used in any particular painting, instead of guessing, I can simply check my palette notebook.
Additionally, the list may help me see how often I need to replace my most used colors, thereby making it easier to order paints before I run out.
I like the happy, bright colors of my final version!
