Sniffing Giraffe

Reference image

Most of the times my Mixed Media pages start with random color on a page, but this one was a bit more planned from the beginning. It started when I stumbled upon a piece of my spotted tissue paper by Décopatch. Immediately I knew I wanted to incorporate it in a page with a giraffe. Last year I used a picture from Pinterest as a reference to make a stylised giraffe on a pin. 

Since I really liked the pose, I decided to re-use that image. (I tried to find the original, but the Pinterest links to a 404 page and a Google image search didn't make me any wiser. )

First I sketched the giraffe's head and a place to put some flowers in my Dylusions Creative Art Journal (Large) so I would know where I could use the tissuepaper.

Because the spots on the paper are small, I decided to not use them as the spots for the giraffe but instead as background. And that's a good thing! As it turns out, giraffe's don't really have a lot of spots on their face. 

The background got covered with blue and green acryl paint (Amsterdam). On top I sponged  translucent white through a stencil with a spot pattern to give it a little more interest and to enhance the spots that almost disappeared behind the blue and green.

I took my time trying to paint the giraffe as best as I could. I'm not a painter and acrylics dry so fast!  But I'm happy with the result. 

The flowers were added with the use of stencils. Some blotched clouds fill in all the blue space and as a final touch I used some gold (finetec) on the rose and splatters. 

Making this the end result:

Doesn't he/she look content?

Thanks for checking in,  bis bald!