'Resonances' 💧🍃 sharing creative process

hi friends, I'm trying something a little different this time for this month's video post..playing around with formatting and presentation. no voiceover this time, just all the footage I had fun editing together and a write up! I didn't feel like recording myself talking and was quite busy this month, so I hope that's alright and hope you enjoy it all the same

👑Part of the 'With You' series🎨

Piece Title: Resonances
Size:  24x24
Materials: oil & gesso on wood panel

completed January 2024 

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painting background, drafts & thoughts:

This piece started off as a very small and silly doodle on a post-it note, while listening to a voice message from my partner 🐕 ! He was describing us finding rhymes & connections between things (something we do very often with media, books, topics etc) like dropping a stone into a body of water and watching the rings spread out. Hearing him say that made me smile and I found the visual so evocative, so I doodled the characters peering into a well. The finished piece feels very special to me, because it's kind of a cute visualization of something that is very fundamental to the way we engage and interact with each other.

Here is the first little doodle:   


I had sketched it on a smaller vertical canvas I had on hand, but it didn't feel quite right after seeing it. I did another sketch on a post it to rethink the composition and this time it was of the characters peering into the reflection of a well.

Here it is:

I definitely liked this more! So I moved forward with this.

Then later, when I decided I wanted to paint the idea, I started to do some color sketches using watercolor in my sketchbook:


I finished this painting in January 2024! I used oil paint on a 24 x 24 wood panel. It feels like it is about about half my size! The larger I start to paint these days the more fun I have holding them and standing next to them. I'm currently on larger pieces now so it's nice to reflect back on how this felt intimidating at the time. One day I really hope to paint mural sized pieces, because I really want to engage with my characters and the visual world I'm making at that scale. something about having them look back at the viewer at such a big size makes me really delighted.
After finishing 'Home In You' which was 18x24, I felt a lil more ready- and was at the art store with my husband 🐻 and looking at various canvases and panels. I held up two wooden circles and asked him which I should go for. He looked at the bigger one and said, "This isn't much bigger than the one you just did- I think it comes down how you want to move around it." 

I hadn't really thought of it that way yet, so I delighted in that perspective.
It's true, it would probably feel easier to move around on it if the details were larger. I've definitely felt that difference as I've started to create larger images.

Here's where the painting started out after applying gesso and doing my pencil sketch:


Starting was fun! I liked drawing the characters much bigger in frame (before this I had just been drawing them quite small or at a distance). But it took me a month and a half to complete! I left for christmas holidays to visit family and came back to it. You can see in the timelapse, there is a point where I paint over a lot of the first rough layer. I had to pause in the middle to do some digital mock-ups because I wasn't sure how to move forward now that the picture was so much bigger than my initial little post it sketch. I didn't want to waste paint. Once I figured out how I wanted the colors to look, I had an easier time continuing. But there's still a part of me that isn't sure if it's completely done yet..
It must be done though, because as I'm writing this in reflection for you guys- I've gotten to sell a handful of the prints already from the recent group show I exhibited at. haha :')

Anyway! I had lots of fun with this piece. I think the little princess and the doggy look so cute at this scale and I liked how warm the lighting turned out. It felt like the first time I painted my characters faces this large and close up in frame. I also had fun using the same technique as I did on Home in You — using thinned paint glazes to mimic how I tend to use overlay layers to change the temperature of an image in digital works for that glowey sunny look. It was also fun to rotate the wooden panel as I was working because it was a circle. I also wanted to paint slightly more impressionist-y and think the wide brushes I used helped out with that effect in the end.
Just lots of fun and enjoyable learning!

It was delightful to share the process with both my partners and friends while I was making it, and now I get to share it with you too

This month's sticker and postcard pull from the painting once again, they look like this:


I've got a couple of other thoughts and updates I want to share with you too, but I'll make a separate post for it after this.

Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting me!

💛
all my love ,
LITTLELIST