Thursday, September 1, 2016

Neon Pink + An Oil Pastel Face (9.1.2016)


It's been a little over a week since I last posted, but it's for good reason.

I haven't really been making a whole lot of art (except the past couple of days I broke because I was already starting to miss it) because I've been working on organizing my art space. Ever since we moved into this house, I don't think that it's ever been properly organized. And by that, I mean a place for everything and everything in its place. It's been clean, but never full out organized.

I'm still not quite done with it, but I've made significant progress, and it's incredibly inspiring. Today, I hope I can inspire you.


As you can see both from the photos above and the photo that started the post off, I've really been enjoying working with bright colors recently. I still like my dramatic bits of black, but I've been trying to experiment a bit.

  • Circles have always been aesthetically pleasing to me, and in the photo on the left, you can see four instances of where I used them. I cut some circles out of a piece of phone book paper and glued them down, made some dots with the end of my paintbrush, stamped a dot/circle stamp, and did some paint splatters.
  • As far as the paint splatters are concerned, I made them with watered down white acrylic paint, let them dry partially, then picked up what was left with a paper towel. That's why they come across more like outlines of circles (I didn't outline them painstakingly, I promise). 
  • Recently I acquired a white gel pen, and I had some fun doodling on this page and playing around with it. The white dots within the yellow ochre circle, and the lines in the crosses were all a result of that.  



Recently I've been inspired by Rae Missigman's 15 Minutes of Mixed Media on youtube. She's a big part of the thoughts behind this page, and the whole reason I decided to add neon pink to my paint collection. I would highly recommend that you check her out. 



Something I'm also extremely excited to announce (if I can even call it an announcement) that I'm doing is participating in 29 Faces for the month of September. I was looking around for something I could do this month, due mostly to the fact that it's officially a new month, and stumbled across this amazing challenge.

I can't guarantee that all the faces I do for this challenge will be mixed media (I already have some digital ideas floating around in my head), but the first one absolutely is. There's some collage (her face was a newspaper page cut into the shape of a face and worked on), oil pastels, acrylic paints and graphite. The watercolor look of her hair was thanks to my Portfolio water soluble oil pastels.

I can't even begin to explain how happy I am with the way she turned out. This page is a bit of a work in progress, as I still have a background to go, but as far as the face is concerned, I think I'm going to leave well enough alone. Just creating this face got the ideas flowing for other types of art, and I'll probably be working in my sketchbook based on this before too long.

I'm super excited to see what the rest of this month will hold, and I hope you'll join me in the adventure!

2 comments:

  1. I really love the way you created this face and especially her eyes.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you, I'm glad that you like her! Personally I feel like the eyes are really important to a face (the windows to the soul) and so I tend to spend the most time on them.

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