A Rescued Painting

I've continued working on a face showing emotion, anger this time. I did the pencil sketch and then decided to do it in colored pencil. I did it twice with my Prismacolors, not liking either version. But I think I know where I went wrong. Number three is going to be better (fingers crossed).

The problem is that I have not really colored anything with my Primacolors since the last time I did a face with them, over a year ago. I use them frequently for shadowing on acrylic pieces, but that is not the same as doing an entire drawing with them. As I worked on the angry face, I have been recalling the techniques I previously used. So I am optimistic that the next version will be better.

I decided to take a little break from the face before I start up again. I found a piece in my box that I started earlier in the summer with Distress Paints. I had an unexpected result and abandoned it at the time. I did save it for possible rescue later. Yesterday afternoon, I decided to give it a try. This is the result.

I had started the piece by covering the paper with Liquitex Super Heavy Gesso. I made lots of little ridges with the palette knife that would make the Distress Paint change directions as it moved. Then I decided to use a dark acrylic glaze to make a shadowy border around the outside edge. After allowing the glaze to dry for a few minutes, I would wipe the glaze away with baby wipes, leaving a grungy area along the ridges created by the gesso.

This technique works fine with regular acrylic paint. But Distress Paint is not regular acrylic paint. When I wiped with the baby wipes, I wiped away all the glaze and much of the Distress Paint. Most of the white in the background of the finished piece is the white of the gesso. That's where I left it.

I first considered trying to cover the places where I could see gesso, but on second thought, I decided to leave it. I had used yellow and blue Distress Paints which mixed in places to create green. Using regular matte acrylic paints, I used stencils to cover much of the background. I was lacking a focal point. I poured on a bit of pink Distress Paint and let it spread and drip. I used a brush to spatter some pink, black, and white paint onto other parts of the page. Once it was dry, I added more stenciling. I outlined the flower and dots in the pink area with markers.

It is certainly not the best thing I have ever done, but it was relaxing and fun to play with stencils and paint.

Supplies used:

• 14 in. X 11 in., 140lb. Strathmore 400 series Mixed Media Paper
• Liquitex Super Heavy Gesso
• Distress Paints - Mustard Seed, Mermaid Lagoon, Picked Raspberry
• Misc. colors and brands of matte acrylic paint
• stencils - mostly from the Crafter's Workshop or the Artistcellar
• Sakura Gelly Roll Moonlight Gel Pens

Back to Faces

There was a time, a couple of years ago, when most of the art I did involved faces. Lots of sketchbooks and journal pages were filled with faces. And then I almost stopped doing them. I hit a plateau and didn't feel like I was progressing at all. Now I find myself drawing and painting faces again, not with the same absorption that I had before, but I am enjoying creating them again.

One of the things that helped was Jane Davenport's new book, Drawing and Painting Beautiful Faces. It is crammed full of techniques using many different mediums. I have a couple of paintings in progress with the goal of learning a new technique.

Recently, Cloth Paper Scissors Magazine published a special addition called FACES: Creating Mixed-media Portraits. One of Dina Wakley's faces is on the cover. If you are interested in creating faces, you are sure to find something in this magazine. There are articles on drawing, painting, collage, abstract, and assemblage techniques. If you are project-oriented, there is a section in the back with directions on a variety of portrait projects, including stitching, doodling, transfers, resist, and more. Some of the artists who contributed to the magazine are Dina Wakley, Pam Carriker, Jane Davenport, and Michael Massen.

An article that immediately caught my attention is Simple Expressions by Karen O'Brien. It describes how to create faces that express emotions, one of the things my faces have been lacking. Her directions helped me create the faces below. I am really out of practice.

Karen draws the type of faces that have the eyes at the outside edge of the face. She, of course, drew her examples in her style. I started to draw a face in her style, which is how I ended up with such a round head. I just couldn't do it. I have to admit that I find those faces creepy. Based on how many people draw like that, it is obvious that others don't have the same reaction. Don't know where the extra skinny neck came from, but I just left it.

The next drawing had a bit of an accident. I was nearly finished and had grabbed a piece of deli paper to cover part of the face so I wouldn't smear the graphite. I put the paper aside. When I grabbed it again, I smeared burnt sienna on my drawing. I had put the paper on top of my palette paper which had open acrylic on it. (Note to Self: When using open acrylic, remember to move the palette paper out of your working area when you are not using it.) I wiped it off as best I could. I decided to show it to you anyway since I thought I did fairly well on this one. We won't mention that she looks like she has the mumps on her right side. ***

I'll be trying some other emotions from Karen's article.

*** Just a little tip: Scanning your art is one of the best ways to see how it really looks. I can look at something repeatedly, even putting it on an easel and looking at it vertically. But when I scan it and it appears on the computer screen, things just pop out at me that I never saw before, some good, some that need fixing. When I am working on a drawing that will become a serious project, I scan several times as I develop the drawing.

Karen O'Brien has another article in the magazine, Face Play: Drawing Faces from Your Imagination. I'm looking forward to trying some of her ideas in that article, too. Karen has a book, Imaginary Creatures, coming out soon.

I also want to try creating a face as part of an abstract painting with the help of Debora L. Stewart's article, Creating an Abstract Portrait. It seems I am hooked on faces again.

Circles on Stain

This is another piece that has taken a long time to be finished...years even. I have a box where I put pieces that I started on single sheets of art paper, but never finished. It might be because I was tired of working on it, but more likely life got in the way and I didn't have time to finish it. Every now and then I look through the box. Some things get thrown out because I know I will never finish them. Some things have been there for several years. Every once in a while I take one out to finish.

Several days before looking through the box, I had created a new background in my daily journal. I used a brayer to apply Mermaid Lagoon Distress Stain to a double page spread. I had just acquired a couple of the new Dylusions Paints to try out, one of which was Lemon Zest. I used an old library card to spread paint over parts of the stained pages. The yellow paint, of course, turned the stained areas green. I now had a blue, green, and yellow background.

As I was looking through my box, I found an unfinished mandala with the same colors I had used on the journal background. Bingo, an a-ha moment! I had drawn the basic mandala shape on watercolor paper and painted the big blocks of space with blue, green, and yellow Twinkling H2Os. It was at that point I had stopped. Just out of curiosity, I looked back in my old journals to find I was drawing lots of mandalas in 2012. Sometimes being a pack rat pays off. :-)

I outlined the mandala and cut it out. I tried it in different places on the page and decided to create more circles for a background. Using a stencil, I drew different sizes of circles. I made 3 blue rings and 3 blue-green solid circles. I used a stencil through a stencil to add the small white circles.

To continue my practice with glazes, I decided to make the blue rings appear 3D by using a darker blue glaze around the edges. I was trying different brushes to see which worked better and each layer was only adding a bit of color.

A layer of glaze has to be completely dry before you can add the next, and glazing liquid dries slowly. If you try to rush it, the new coat of glaze will remove any color that happens to be even a bit damp. So I set it aside and go onto something else.

I worked on the rings off and on for several weeks, but then non-art things needed to be done. The journal was closed and was only opened to this spread again this past Wednesday evening.

I added some yellow dots to the blue rings and to the mandala with Dina Wakley's heavy body paint and a pencil eraser. While they were drying, I used a previously scanned copy of the mandala to try out doodles before I did them on the real thing. I'm glad I did that because I tried a bunch of things before I figured out the leaves with a flower. I used various markers to add my doodles to the mandala. I did discover that some markers don't write very well on Twinks.

I used Prismacolor pencils to add shadowing to my background circles and rings. Scor-tape was used to secure the mandala to the background.

Supplies used:

• Strathmore Hardback Mixed Media Art Journal
• Distress Stain - Mermaid Lagoon (applied with brayer)
• Dylusions Paint - Lemon Zest
• circle stencils
• Amsterdam Standard Greenish Blue Acrylic
• Blick Matte White Acrylic
• Golden Acrylic Glazing Liquid (Satin)
• Golden Fluid Acrylic - Paynes Gray
• Dina Wakley Media Heavy Body Acrylic Paint - Lemon
• Twinkling H2Os on watercolor paper
• Sharpie Poster Paint Markers
• Montana ExtraFine Acrylic Paint Marker
• Gelly Roll Stardust Pens
• Sakura Gelly Roll Moonlight Gel Pen
• Prismacolor Pencils

Finished at last! It feels really good to finish something.

Accumulate

I'm not going to bore you with why it has been so long since I have written a post. I'll just say I was away from home for a few days. Since then, I've been busy and sometimes there are not enough hours in the day to get it all done.

I have been messing around with a piece of art. I call it Accumulate since that is how it was created, a bit at a time. Also, dealing with my accumulation of stuff is one of the things keeping me so busy lately. OK, I admit it. I am a pack rat.

It started out to be my week 6 project for the Summer of Color, two oranges and a blue, which I did not finish in time. Since I was over the deadline, I decided to add some other colors. I was really having a problem with the limitation of colors, too much like monochrome.

I originally started out with the 14" X 11" paper in landscape to which I added a bit of Liquitex Super Heavy Gesso on part of the paper to add some texture. In case you have never used it, it is like a thick cake icing that you spread with a palette knife. Some people like to pile it on, but I usually use a more moderate amount.

Once it dried, I painted on some messy geometric shapes, using blue, two oranges, and a brown I mixed from blue and orange. I added some blue-striped washi tape and a chevron pattern with a homemade stamp and blue paint. That's where I was when my time for SOC6 ran out.

It remained on my art table. I would look at it once in a while, wondering where to go from there. One rainy afternoon I got out my stencils and a sponge to make several additions in orange. Boring! I remembered a green I had made by mixing the blue and orange. It would be dark though. I decided to use the brighter Golden Green Gold instead. When I started outlining, I wanted something besides fluorescent orange. I used fluorescent yellow. I was feeling much better after adding some more bright colors.

Over the next couple of weeks I added the flower beside the washi tape, the dots to the chevrons, and the circle-sticks marks. While I was turning the paper to make my colored scribbles on my circle-sticks, I decided I liked the piece better in portrait orientation. It took nearly four weeks, a bit added here and a bit added there before this accumulation of bits was finished. Yes, I know it is a big mess, but that's what happens when you accumulate things. If I ever get this place cleaned out, I resolve to stop accumulating things.

Supplies used:

• 14 in. X 11 in., 140lb. Strathmore 400 series Mixed Media Paper
• Liquitex Super Heavy Gesso
• Amsterdam Standard Acrylic Paint: Primary Cyan, Azo Orange, Prussian Blue
• Liquitex Interference Orange
• Golden High Flow Fluorescent Orange
• Golden Matte Acrylic Green Gold
• stencils from the Crafter's Workshop
• Molotow One4All Acrylic Paint Markers
• Sakura Gelly Roll Moonlight Gel Pens
• Blue Fude Ball 1.5 Pen
• Black Stabilo CarbOthello Pastel Pencil