All caught up!!

I have finally caught up with all my Let's Face It 2017 lessons - courtesy of doing no housework and my job quieting down so I had extra days at home. That's the problem with working for various public libraries - feast or famine - and at the moment it is famine with all my libraries. How different from my last post when I was so busy.

Anyway, that meant a long weekend to do lots of art. I also cooked two meals to refill my freezer and did some laundry - but that was the extent of my homely chores. It is hot again with 6 days in a row around 30 degrees, but we are getting cool sea breezes at night to help us sleep.

I am amazed at how versatile the lessons are on LFI 2017 - every week another talented artist takes us on a journey through another technique. Some of the lessons are very detailed and require hours of work, which leaves little time for my Facebook challenges - but those are free, and I paid for LFI 2017, so I need to concentrate on that. Besides, I am learning so much!

Let's Face It Week 6 - Effy Wild

Wow, was this lesson complex!!! Effy had us build up layers on our background before sketching in a face. There were so many steps and I had to spray it with fixative so many times, that I lost count. We used glazes to delineate some areas with colour, i.e.: the scarf and the background.

This is an interim photo showing how a blue and magenta glaze changes the background which started out looking like her dress. The face gets painted with gesso as a basis for drawing and painting the face.

Eventually after various applications of paint and coloured pencils, I ended up with the lady below. It only took me a week!

Let's Face It Week 7 - Renata Loree

A a complete change, this week we got a mini lesson from Renata, where we could use either ink or watercolour to paint a face and try to fix values to show light and shadow. Renata had a great image of a dreadlocked girl, and to stave off the "shades of grey" jokes at work, I used  blue watercolour.

This was a fun and quick lesson - just exactly what I needed after the intensity of Effy's lesson last week.

Let's Face It Week 8 - Jennifer Bonneteau

Wow, again! Jen's lesson was so interesting and I'm not sure I really succeeded, but I had fun trying.
We were encouraged to pick a painting by Voka, an Austrian artist and use that colour scheme in our own painting.

I used Jen's reference photo and picked one of Voka's portraits of Andy Warhol. A tip we were given was to photograph our portrait and then convert it to black & white to check the values we had painted against the reference photo. This immediately shows up where we might need lighter or darker colour values - it was really interesting to do this and see the underlying values.

Her mouth still needs work and I need to watch the video where Jen shows us how to paint teeth without making them scary, but now I am ready for lesson 9 which came out today and promises to be very different.

Journal 52 Week 8 - Stillness

I had a play with some of the printouts I did of Voka faces and tried a messy collage, adding some watercolour pencil details. As often happens, things did not turn out how I had planned - so the best thing to fix that is to draw something and then paint over the mess. So inspired by something I saw yesterday, I drew some bird shapes and gessoed over the rest of the page.

I then used black paint to outline the birds, paint in their legs, and some tail feathers (to shake). I wrote the word "peace" which is a synonym of stillness, because in my experience birds are never still, but can be peaceful to watch.

Thanks for visiting, leave a comment if you like, and take care of yourself. Ciao for now!