Thank you Claudia, for a great class! I very much enjoyed it, and will be sure to further explore this mixed media idea in the future (I have ideas to potentially use it on photos I took on a recent holiday). All of that colour and texture certainly makes for a joyous, playful and energetic illustration.

 

MEDIA EXPERIMENTATION: 
I first pulled all kinds of old media that I've had sitting in my cupboard for years (decades, in some cases) -- markers, acrylic paint, charcoal pencils, oil and chalk pastels, coloured pencils, watercolour pencils, paint pens, children's crayons, different papers -- and tested them atop one another, uncovering certain things that did, and didn't, work together.

 

PROCESS:
I decided I would illustrate my own home currently, as opposed to my childhood home. This is a photo of the house, and the drawing I freehanded from it. I added in tiny versions of my two dogs, my shadows -- Cove & Wynn -- sitting on the verandah together.

I then played around with a few colour schemes and tested some on thumbnails of the house. I don't feel so confident with colour and colour schemes, so ultimately, I just decided to go for it with the several colours I created with my paints and just see where the process of blocking in colour took me.

 

PRODUCT:
I used mainly a paint pen, markers, coloured and charcoal pencils and an ink brush pen to add the detail and textures, and ended up with this quirky little cottage. The sky got a bit too dark and crowded with the spirals, so I went over the whole thing with a white coloured pencil which seemed to blend out and tone it down some.

Ultimately, although it's not a style I usually use myself (with so much vivid colour) I actually really enjoyed the process and love the vibrance and energy of the end result. 

 

[Class completed: April 2021]