My Entry to UOB Painting of the Year Competition

  I joined the UOB Painting of the Year Competition this year. It's my first time entering it, and I decided to do a piece that showed tangles. My main idea was to have a girl surrounded by pastel colours and tangles. I knew that the pieces that would be submitted for the competition would be considerably large, so I decided to make my piece in a larger format. I found a frame that I thought was a good size then cut a large sheet of Fabriano paper to fit the frame. The art work ended up being 50cm by 70cm (19.6" by 27.5").

This was my sketch:

I inked the girl and the plants so that the camera would be able to capture what I drew. You can also see the light markings I did for the background segments.

    Then I added Winsor and Newton watercolours on the background. I stuck to blues, pinks, and purples.

  Making progress on the tangles...

  Tangles completed! Now onto shading! I used Tombow's dual brush markers.

  I also added details using a white Uni-ball Signo Broad pen, and the gold finish was added with Finetec paints.

  Moving onto the girl and the flowers, I used Derwent's Coloursoft coloured pencils, sticking to the colour scheme of pink, blue, purple.

  And finally, after three full days of working on this piece, I was done. I really do prefer the quicker gratification I receive when I work on a regular Zentangle® tile.

  Here are some detail shots:

  The results will be out this week. I'm excited. We'll see how it goes. Prize or not, I'm extremely proud of this art piece, and it's shown me how far I've come artistically in the past two years and what I can achieve.