Art Explosion | Circus

This is my entry for this week's Art Explosion contest hosted by @juliakponsford. The theme is about circuses. There's a lot of imagery associated with circuses. I wanted to use the human form in some way and as I'm not too good at drawing the proportions correctly, I thought I'd go with a surreal/abstract theme. That allowed me to be a little more comfortable as the rules of proportion don't have to apply to surreal art.

I start by drawing pencil outlines of circus related imagery that came to mind.

I then slowly start filling in the outlines with pen strokes and colour. I recently got myself some wax crayons and sketch pens and thought I'd put them to use. I associate red and yellow stripes with the circus, and used only those colours only to convey the theme better.

For my background, I paint random yellow and red lines with gouache paint and then use earbuds dipped in water to fill the gaps between and merge the colours into one another.

After inking and colouring everything, I edit a picture of the art to boost the colours and finally add a filter that I think makes it look more circusy.