First Post - Acetate Cartoon

For my very first creative post on this blog, I went back to a cartoon artwork that I made way back in 1997! It was a fun, (original) piece made by drawing characters with a permanent marker onto acetate and then colouring them in by painting on the back of the acetate with gouache paint. A patterned paper or picture is placed (can be stuck) behind the acetate for the background. The idea for doing this I got from an old art book that was written by the very talented children's TV presenter, Tony Hart. When painting this one today, I decided to explore further the feeling of depth so I drew the characters on the front of the clipframe glass instead of onto acetate. The characters were painted on the back of the glass with a mixture of gouache and pva:Some of the smaller characters were painted onto another piece of acetate to create the impression of disappearing into the distance and I placed holographic patterned card into the clipframe for the background. Apologies for the quality of the photo of the finished picture (1st photo) but holographic paper does not photograph well.

This picture shows you how the characters were drawn: A successful day creating my first piece of artwork for 2010.

P.S. Just thought I'd add this picture of what my DH and children have been up to today!:
Weather was freeeeeezing today, so what did they do? They went out to fetch some fallen branches and twigs to make a fire in our garden firepit and then cooked the pasta for their tea in this great big cooking pot!  Me? I stayed in the cosy warm indoors!