She’s a palette cleanser. I mean that literally. I painted this little gouache illustration in my sketchbook this morning using some of the remaining paint left over from finishing my work on Tuesday. For a painter, I’ve always been particularly bad at estimating how much paint I’m actually going to need for anything! I always end up with far too much or far too little of a color, and when I reach the end of a piece with a bunch of usable paint in the well, it seems a shame to wash the extra away just because I have to move on to something new.
In this case, my palette is full of paint from finishing my Winter Greenery gouache illustration! That’s really exciting for me, since it means that tomorrow, I get to move on getting the gears rolling working on the next sort of thing I want to produce: notebooks.
This little painting began as a doodle showing just the woman’s head with a crown that was sitting undeveloped in my sketchbook. I rebalanced the same colors used in the botanical illustration to fill the summer scene by focusing on the cooler end of the color spectrum. This was a bit of an experiment to see how Sharpie marker works over dry gouache paint. Although the effect looks pretty nice, the paint seemed to clog up the felt tip of the pen. I like having those crisp lines, though, so it might be worth it!