Velvet Art Monsters

I picked up this little pack of velvet art images from The Works for just a couple of quid.

Do you remember velvet art posters? They used to be everywhere when I was a kid – way back in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s. They were usually large poster sized pieces of heavy cardstock, and you can still get them like that sometimes.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve done a few of these since being an “adult”, and I even have a small stack of them waiting to be done one day.

But I’m a sucker for monsters, so I had to pick this up.

For £2 you got three different images, and a dinky little set of felt tip pens.

For tiny cheap markers they were actually pretty good and saturated.

Unfortunately, they are water-based, and therefore streaky. Plus, the velvet has a tendency to bleed into your ink. So I did five monsters with them, one for each colour.

Then I switched to alcohol markers for the rest of the little monsters. For the big monster in the middle I was initially going to do a pastel gradient, to make him stand out. But I quickly realised that wasn’t going to work out.

The material didn’t really allow for a blend, and the bleeding velvet did not work well with the pastel colours. You can see the mess even more when I tried the eyeball.

Okay, so let’s cover up the pastel with greys.

Or not.

At this point I was about ready to give up and throw the damn thing in the bin. So I took a break and took a photo of Jasper being adorable on the packaging.