Journal Sketch turns into a Painting

Okay, here it is! My little sketch that I just turned into a 12"x 12" painting on a birch panel. I did some collage first, then added some background color with Golden acrylic paints. After that came the face with Shiva oil sticks (which I absolutely adore), and then her flowers and leaves in the hair were done with watercolor pencils (again, love them!). I finished off the painting with some more collage, and used various pens and markers to make some more marks. Oh - and then I also used Stabilo pencils in black and graphite to outline and/or add some shading to her face. I love my pencils too much to let them go entirely. The colors in this photo are a little off, and I lost some of the tones in her skin in this jpeg, but that's okay. I still like it, and I hope you do too! :)

The next photo is a little detail shot of the birdie and a few of the words. I just thought that it was so cute!


This was done as a donation for a fundraiser for the South Carolina Aquarium. I hope that it brings in some money for them, as I love the aquarium and used to volunteer there, several years ago. Here is the flyer for the fundraiser:
It looks like it will be a great time, so if you are in the area, head over to the event and bid on my piece, if you like it, or just have a cocktail and help out the aquarium.

Doing this painting was a huge amount of fun for me and I am really looking forward to doing some more in the future! This has also gotten my brain turning and I'm thinking about doing some more drawing into my clay sculptures... but we will see. That will take a little experimenting to get it just right. Let me know what you think! :)