Playing Catch Up (9.8.2016)

Due to a lot of things happening last night, it was impossible for me to post on here, as much as I wanted to. However, I still did manage to complete a face, so I had that going for me. Almost as a bonus for you guys, you get to see two faces today!

First and foremost, we have the face that I completed yesterday. This one is a little rough, and was done in colored pencils and graphite. 

This face in particular had unpromising beginnings, so in the end I'm happy with the way she turned out. Essentially, I began the very rough sketch in the dark in a moving car, so it was a little weird when it came to proportions. However, all things considered, I think she turned out very royal looking. 

Somewhere along the way, while I was coloring her, she began to remind me vaguely of Gwen from the television show Merlin - some of the influences started to work for me after that. I would still like to try this girl in particular again, perhaps digitally. We'll see what happens!

Now, we have today's face, which I am extremely happy with. 

I'm beginning to get to the point with painting faces where I'm getting more comfortable with it - it's almost soothing, actually. Sometimes things don't exactly turn out as I planned, but I'm trying to learn to be okay with that. For example, I know this girl's shoulder should be extended further out. However, for this concept to work, that would be impossible. And that's okay!

I took some influences from Tuesday's painted girl as the inspiration for this piece. Of course, there are many things that weren't even close to the same - for example, I didn't use any oil pastels at all in this painting, though the other face's skin tone was almost exclusively oil pastel.

• The main idea that I took from the other post was the dark black painted outlines around the entirety of the character. That was an extremely appealing aesthetic to me, and I felt the need to try to recreate it. Part of me feels like it's going to become a part of my style, though I'm not going to be attempting to nail anything down in stone. 
• In the left photo, you can see some of the finer details of this girl's eye. I'm particularly happy with this part of the painting, I think that the eyelashes turned out great and the color of the eye is extremely pretty. The finer details of the eye were done with a Sharpie pen (again, sometimes they're just great for the small things), but the majority of this face was done in acrylics and graphite pencil. 
• On the left, you can see some of the interesting textures I was able to achieve, especially in the neck area. I've never painted on cardboard before, and it was certainly a new experience (one that I enjoyed immensely and will have to experiment with in the future!).

 

•  In this first photo, you can see some of the better details of the cheek coloring, which I thought was nice. I was playing with some neon pink and trying to get it to blend - I think it did exactly what I wanted it to, luckily enough.
• In this final photo, there are several things that stand out to me. Quite obviously, the focus is on the hair, which is in a style very similar to my own (I think I might need to try thinking outside the box with my next hairstyle), but with highlights to match this girl's eyes. I like the texture that was achieved under the hairline, caused both in part by scratchy acrylic paint and by graphite pencil. The texture in her eye shadow is another added bonus.

In the long run, I've been having a lot of fun experimenting with these faces and playing around with new techniques and ideas - I hope all of you are enjoying following my journey as much as I am enjoying taking it. I love hearing from all of you in the comments, it honestly makes my day!

I hope you all have an amazing day, and I thank you all for visiting.

Journal Cover Transformation (9.6.2016)

For today's face for the 29 Faces challenge, I only knew one thing for certain.

I knew that I wanted to transform one of the journals above (they were found in the craft isle of Target and have 60 pages each - they were also dirt cheap and I thought they'd make cute art journals), and I knew that I wanted to do another mixed media piece. I had the idea that I wanted to do a collage/doodle kind of thing, but somewhere along the way, I pulled away. I still might go back to that kind of idea, but for right now, I'm glad that I changed my mind. 

 Here is the completed journal cover. As I said the other day about a mixed media face, I literally could not be happier with this face. There are so many different things that I love about it, and just as I think I've covered them all, I think of more. It is becoming quite obvious to me that the more I do this, the better I get - big surprise there.

This piece is absolutely my aesthetic, everything that I could have hoped it would be. I wasn't exactly going for the punk look when I started her out, but it just happened. In the long run, I'm super excited to start working in this little journal.

In these photos, you can see some close ups of some different parts of the face that I adore.

• In the left photo, the thing that is front and center is the earring, and it's a little detail that I absolutely adore. I'm not even sure why, especially considering that it's so simple. You can also see some of the detailing of the ultra defined lines - that's one of the things that remained intact from the original idea. The gold around her eyes was gold marker that I added as one of the finishing details.
• Also on the left, you can see a few black dots peeking out from behind the girl's hair. This is a piece of tissue paper in a pattern I've been hoarding for a good long while, just because I love it so much. I finally decided to break it out for this cover, and I'm glad that I did. 
• On the right side, you can see a lot more of this girl's clothing details, which I'm also extremely happy with. The cut out panels of her collar seem to fit her style, as does her choker. Both were done simply with acrylic paint. Her shirt was cut out of a piece of paper I had painted on previously and decided would look good for a shirt. I'm also a big fan of the little cluster of stamping and paint above this shoulder. 
• The face itself is made of a combination of collage, acrylic paint, Portfolio oil pastels, graphite, and markers. Essentially, when it comes to mixed media, I just throw in whatever I think might help the end result.

Overall, I'm extremely happy and excited with the progress I've been making on this challenge. As time goes on, even though it's only the 6th and my 7th face, I feel like I'm making art that I like more. And in the end, that's what it's all about. 

Thank you for visiting, and I look forward to hearing from you!

A Concept Come to Life (9.5.2016)

 Seeing as today was Labor Day and I spent most of it visiting with family, I only have a quick face to share with all of you today (I might work on some mixed media later tonight, but I have to work early tomorrow so we'll see).

This had been a concept in my mind for the past couple of days, and I decided to give it a shot. It didn't turn out quite as great as it had been in my head, but I do like the way that it turned out, even if it does look better from a distance.

Despite the fact that I like it better from a distance, I'll allow some closer photographs anyways.

• In both of the above photos, you can see the line where I erased away the skin shading a good bit to create a more defined edge. If I had a do over, I wouldn't have done any skin shading at all, and would have left the details of the face (the eyes, the eyebrows, the nose and the mouth) as the only bits of drawing and shading. However, I got a little overenthusiastic with the shading and wanting to add hair and ended up having to blend it out.
• On the left, you can see some of the finer details of the eyelashes. I don't know why I like these eyelashes in particular, but I did feel like it was one of the more interesting touches of this piece, especially in all of its simplicity.
• In the right photo, you can see what is probably my favorite parts of this entire face. I entirely adore the way the watercolor dried, even if it did smudge a bit. The line where the watercolor didn't even make it was also cool and thoroughly enjoyed. The highlights in the lips are another plus.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I don't have a whole lot to share with all of you, but I hope that you enjoyed the face that I did come up with. In the end, I like her, even if I would do her differently if I had another shot (and who knows, maybe I'll try this concept again in the future!).

Thank you all for visiting, and I hope you all had a good day. I look forward to seeing you all next time.

Mixed Media Canvas Portrait (9.4.2016)

I honestly don't think I could be happier with the way today's 29 Faces piece came out.

I worked on this for a few solid hours before I was finally happy, but it was the complete opposite of yesterday's feeling rushed. It was nice to just work while listening to music, not worrying about much else. I did this piece on a canvas, so that's still a new sort of learning experience, but I'm much happier with this piece than the other canvases that I did.

• Right off the bat, the first thing that draws attention is the hair. This was a shimmer paint that I got from Target last night, and I'm extraordinarily happy with the results of using it for her hair. I had tried to give her a braid, but the more I worked at it, the more I realized she was probably better suited for long, wavy hair.
• The inspiration for this piece, the thing that made me want to make it in the first place, was the idea of incorporating the butterflies into this girl's hair. If you've been following my 29 Faces journey, you'll have seen that the other day I drew a girl with a fairly elaborate mask. She's probably my second favorite face that I've done for this challenge thus far, and her mask was somewhat inspired by the elaborate details often associated with butterflies. From there, this idea was formed.
• On the right, you can see some of the details of this girl's eyes. I actually painted them first, and then painted her hair over top of the face, in order to better get a feel of the flow of the hair and the way it would fall more accurately. 

•  On the left, you can see one of my favorite bits of this entire painting. This little cluster of butterflies, plus the stark contrast of stamping and the gray painted circles pretty much define everything that I love about this piece.
• You can also see some of the texture in this girl's hair in these photos. I think what happened there was that underneath the painting I did a good bit of collage (most of which was covered by the face - you can see some bits of newspaper text at the very top of the piece though) using Mod Podge. Then I dried her hair with a heat gun. It was a sort of happy accident, and I'm super excited that it happened like that.
• The right hand photo is my second favorite part of the painting. It's soft and feminine, and the sharp black stamping adds just the right stylistic contrast for my liking - if you know me, that's basically my fashion style. I like to mix leather jackets and boots with lace and florals. I think that's part of why I love this canvas so much. 

I hope you all enjoyed viewing this painting as much as I enjoyed creating it and love the finished result. It's been great to hear from all of you in the comments, it really makes my day! Until next time, I hope you all have a good time with your art!

Watercolor Experiments (9.3.2016)

Watercolor is one of those art supplies that I've always had and always wished I was better at using, but I've never actually put the time into learning to use them. They've just always felt intimidating to me, and everyone always seemed so much better at them than me that I hardly ever tried.

But no more!

Recently, I've become intrigued by watercolors as a medium, and I was sick and tired of being intimidated by them. Over the past couple of days, I've been attempting to venture into different ways of using watercolors, and I'll be sharing some of my experiments here.

First and foremost is the photo above. To be completely fair, this piece isn't all watercolor - it's actually Sharpie and gel pens over the top of a watercolor wash. However, this was extremely soothing to experiment with and was a fun way to play around with some ideas that had been floating around in my head.

My next watercolor experiment was much more specific. This is face 4/29 of the 29 Faces challenge, and I'm fairly happy with the way it turned out. The hairstyle was extremely inspired by my new haircut that I got last night, and it's probably my favorite part of this piece. The color scheme is another thing that I'm particularly happy with. 

It's in the close ups that you can see this piece's unique watercolor charm. There are the sorts of things that initially drew me to watercolor in the first place, and I'm happy that I was at least partially able to recreate them.

• On the left, you can see some of the watercolor stain-like marks, especially in the ear and the corners of the eyes. The shape of shading for the nose is another one of my favorite parts of this piece - it reminds me of a comic book-esque style, of which I am definitely a fan.
• Here you can also see that I cheated just a bit - I used a Sharpie pen (which I highly recommend, by the way - I love using them for my morning pages and they are extremely pleasant and flow nicely) to add the details of the nose in a dark black. I didn't want them to run, and it seemed to be the perfect tool for the job.
• On the right, you can see a bit better detail on the lips. I like the expression that this girl in particular has, playful yet somewhat suspicious.

Last, but certainly not least, here you can see some of the finer details of the hair. Playing around with the different shades and layers of brown to create strands was extremely fun to do, and it was much simpler to add texture with watercolors than with a lot of other mediums. 

Now we make our way to the final (work in progress) watercolor experiment that I have to share with you. I saw several people doing this on different social media sites (instagram, pinterest, etc.), and I felt like it would be fun to give it a shot. 

As you can see in these photographs, not all of my blotches of color have doodles in them yet, but this is another thing that I found extremely soothing to do while watching youtube videos or just sitting and listening to music. It was almost meditative. Again, I used a Sharpie pen to make these marks. 

None of these pieces are perfect, but I hope that inspires you to do something with watercolors, especially if they're something that you've been avoiding! What are your opinions on watercolors? I look forward to hearing from you!

Two Faces + A Canvas Pair (9.2.2016)

At least during September, I want to attempt to be more frequent with my posting - daily if possible. I'm not going to make any promises, because I have been extremely busy lately, but I'll do my best.

I figured I would start this post off strong with some sketches I did for 29 Faces. These are faces 3/29, and they came together fairly easily. I use Derwent Graphic Pencils for the majority of my graphite sketches, and this was no exception. In this case, I used an HB for the base sketches, then added details and shading with a 3B.

• The girl on the left is somewhat of a variation of yesterday's face, but a version that I envision to have orange hair. Honestly, I just loved the hairstyle so much that I felt like I needed to play around with it some more.
• On the right was an idea I started conceptualizing yesterday as well. Underneath yesterday's portrait, there was a failed attempt at an oil pastel face. The texture of the background didn't blend well with the oil pastels (I wasn't thinking), and it ended in disaster. However, the girl I had been playing with ended up with some rather free-flowing lines around her eyes that reminded me of a mask. That was what I was trying to recreate here. Part of me thinks that she could be a superhero.

Now we arrive at the "I don't know what I think" portion of the post. I've been wanting to create a set of canvases for a good long while now, but I sort of think that I rushed these a bit. I'm not a huge fan, and I tried to push myself to use warm colors when I'm more of a cool color kind of person.

These were done for part of the 30 in 30 challenge, which is another one of the main reasons I'm going to be trying to blog more often.

 Part of me just thinks that they're underdeveloped. I started adding details like words and giant ink circles when the background wasn't yet ready for it. However, I took a bit of a different direction than I'm used to and I'm more conflicted about it than anything. I don't hate them, I don't love them, I'm somewhere in the middle.

Who knows, maybe somewhere along the way I'll decide to add more onto them, and I'll fix them up to a point where I love them. If I do, you'll all be the first to know!

Thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to seeing you next time.

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!