Having fun

I have been having some fun with the week nine lesson in Let's Face It 2017, even though I did not have the right tools. I still cannot get over the variety of lessons provided and we are only at week 10 of 52!!

Unfortunately, I am not getting much done with my other challenges. Even with work being quiet for the last couple of weeks, I seem only to be able to concentrate on LFI lessons with the occasional journal page thrown in.

Let's Face It Week 9 - Deb Weiers

Deb does these amazing whimsical characters with pen and ink, and she gave us an insight into her process with an introductory video. We then got detailed instructions for a project using coloured inks, collage and loose pen work.

My character is based on some photos of Margot Robbie in "Love" magazine and has a 1950's vibe which Deb picked up on in her comments. I used my Distress stains and Signo pens - but will be buying some inks and a proper pen & nib in the future.

After I had drawn the hair, I was reminded of the old rhyme my mother used to tell us: 

There once was a girl

Who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good

She was very, very good

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

 A couple of the participants did giraffes, so I was very tempted to try my hand at one too. BUT then I saw a post on FB from Landline about camels in the outback with a wonderful close-up photo, so I did a camel instead! This was done on a page where I had wiped off leftover paint - all I did was tone it down a bit with pale grey and draw the camel with black & white Signo pens.Shading was done using water soluble black coloured pencil.

Naturally, I had to find a rhyme about camels - a clean one, as there are way too many iffy limericks out there!! Anyway, I did find a nice limerick called Nance & her Dance by Shira:

There once was a camel named Nance

Who decided to learn how to dance.

She wiggled her hump

And shimmied her rump

Whenever they gave her the chance.

My next bright idea was to draw and paint Merlin (my niece's old horse). My niece regularly posts old photos of Merlin on FB, even though he has been gone for a few years, and everyone oohs & aahs and says what a great horse he was.

This is the reverse of the process for the 1950's girl where we gesso'd over the background so she stood out - instead I gesso'd over the horse outline to make him stand out. Again, the background is leftover paint wiped over a blank page in my 8x8 journal.

I find that I like drawing animals, so I am collecting reference photos and may try some more family pets - past & present. But next time I'll do them on separate sheets, so I can give them away.

Journal 52 Week 9 - Emerge

A constant image on our television screens lately, is one of people (mainly women & children) emerging from the ruins of war-torn cities in Syria and Iraq. So that was the first thing that popped into my head with this week's Journal 52 prompt.

Again I used a page where I had wiped leftover paint, but this time in a vertical pattern, so it was reminiscent of buildings or people. I defined some of the shapes with water soluble pencil and added extra colour with water soluble crayons. I gesso'd lightly around the edges to look like smoke or dust and wrote the words.

This was a quick page to do - very intuitive - but it hit a nerve with many group members when I posted it.

Well my next LFI lesson involves OIL paint and I am still trying to decide if I will use this medium (which I haven't really liked in the past) or try doing the lesson using acrylics. Am I adventurous enough to try the oils? And if I still don't like them, what will I do with the leftover paint, mediums & brushes? There's more reasons not to use them - cost of materials & storage afterwards.

Anyway, thanks for looking - hope you enjoyed your visit and come again. 

Keep well and bye for now.

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!

Catching up again

I really can't believe how fast time goes by - it certainly doesn't seem like three and a half weeks since my last post. Partly, I suppose, it's because work has been busy - four full days per week and then on my day off I have to do shopping (to get a discount) and clean (because my cleaner has hurt her knee, and is out of action). That means that I am behind with all my challenges and my paid classes, so I have not had much to post about.

Anyway last week, I finished the bulk of the books for the new library I have been working on and managed to complete a couple of challenges plus what was a big lesson for Let's Face It 2017. So here I am catching up with posting my work.

Mission Inspiration - January 2017

I got this challenge in by the skin of my teeth, using the revamped list of steps. I still don't really like the rigidity of following steps like this, but I do like the colour suggestions and the words to use.

Personally... I think my page is very ordinary, but I followed all eight steps, so that means, mission accomplished!

Journal 52 Week 6 - Dream

I got the inspiration for this on Pinterest where I collect possible backgrounds, but this was really dreamy and I thought I could use some daubers to make the marks. It uses white, pink, purple, orange & turquoise paint with a hint of gold round the edges.

Journal 52 Week 1 - Portal

I had leftover paint from the dream page, so with the addition of black to make the purple darker, I made this page to signify a portal or doorway. The inspiration came from a photo of a nebula which I also found on Pinterest.

Both of these pages were really quick and easy to make in my 9 x 5 Dylusions journal and gave me a little pick-me-up to get started on the big lesson from Juna Biagioni on Let's Face It 2017.

Let's Face It Week 5 - Lynda King / Colour Me Positive Week 4 - How We Treat Others

I'm doing my LFI ain the same order that I completed them - that is, I did the week 5 lesson before I did week 4. I also used this panting for week 4 of CMP because of the lovely light in her eyes.

Lynda's lesson was about using watercolour pencils with mediums other than water to activate them. It was a very interesting lesson and is a technique I will use again.

Let's Face It Week 4 - Juna Biagioni

We are still looking at values and how we can use different values of a colour to highlight or shadow.

Juna's lesson used just three shades - light medium and dark - to get the image on the page. We spent time refining then glazed the portrait before adding subtle colour with oil sticks or soft oil crayons.

This was a complex lesson with lots of videos to watch, however, I think I chose the wrong photo to copy - there was not much contrast between light and dark. I also made her mouth too small and her hair a bit too boofy. 

The reference photo was altered to show the areas of light & dark. My portrait above is before any glazing or colour was added. It was done using just the three shades of colour.

The portrait below is the finished version with blue glaze added to the background, magenta to the face and a mix of magenta & yellow to the hair. I followed up with soft wax crayons, toning down the face and trying to emphasise the lighter areas. I also gave her lips, hair and eyes more colour

Lots of interesting techniques learned in this lesson and especially, the use of glazes. While I may not be really happy about my work, I am loving all the new things I am learning - I just need to find time to practise, practise, practise.

Thanks a lot for visiting, leave a comment if you want, and I'll see you in "blogland" sometime soon. Cheers.

More Faces

I am concentrating on the Let's Face It classes at the moment and not doing much with the art journal challenges - because, lack of inspiration and time.

Finding inspiration still presents the biggest problem when completing these set challenges - and then of course, when inspiration does strike it is another matter entirely to get it down on the page exactly as you see it in your head.

I've done two Journal 52 challenges and neither has turned out quite how I was hoping.

Journal 52 Week 2 - Hope

I did this in my small Dylusions journal, emulating day 4 of Effy Wild's pages for the #MiniMoleyDaily challenge that she is also running. Effy's is much shinier & brighter - her greenish paint was much more translucent so the gold stencilling showed up. I may have another go at this for a different challenge.

Journal 52 Week 3 - Strange

I started with napkin remnants covered over with paint in various shades and then dry-brushed with silver. I stamped the words and felt it needed something - so I drew a face. She has hearts on her cheeks and multi-coloured hair. The hair overpowered the letter stamps so I had to go over them with my black Uniball. Not quite the effect I was looking for!

Let's Face It Week 2 revisited.

As I mentioned last time, I decided to try my profile portrait from week one again. So I did both a grid portrait and a burnished portrait. Surprisingly, the grid portrait still looks longer in the face than the original photo - how does that happen?

The burnished version below is better - as it should be!

Let's Face It Week 3 - Values

Well we've finished the review portion and re now getting stuck into painting portraits this week with our first lesson on grey scale values. Again, I've made the face longer than in the reference photo - that is obviously something I'm going to have to work on!

I didn't have a board or a Stabilo All Pencil, so used a heavy duty paper and water soluble pastel. Using gesso to get the different shades of grey was interesting - it worked really well if you got just the right amount of gesso on your brush. An exercise in control for me who tends to overload her brush!

Something else I will have to try again when I have the right materials - but the Stabilo pencil is proving elusive.

Thanks for looking and reading - look after yourselves til next time. Cheers.

A new year means a new challenge

Happy New Year to everyone - I hope you all had a break from work and could spend time with family and friends. Because it was so hot here, we had a Christmas BBQ - just chops, rissoles and snags with salad, followed by pavlova and chocolate ripple cake. YUM!!!!!

It was the perfect lunch for the weather and we all enjoyed it very much. My brother rang our other brother (he's in Brisbane) so with the phone on speaker, we all got to talk to each other for the first time in about three years. The four of us have not got together since just after my 60th birthday.

So this year, I have paid for a year-long course on drawing and painting faces, run by Kara Bullock at Let's Face It 2017. (https://karabullockart.com/lets-face-it-2017-registration/) It is my first PAID course and I am wanting to make the most of it, so I will probably not do as many weekly challenges this year. However, I will try to combine some of my weekly prompts just like I have seen others do.

Anyway, here is a catch-up on what I have done since the last time I posted.

Colour Me  Positive Week 52 - Christmas

Having pulled out out all my Christmas stuff , I found this great napkin with the funky Santa image. The background was swiped in seasonal colours and the words are from a stencil. I added some glitter accents, did a bit of doodling and even added stickers from my Christmas lunch cracker.

Colour Me Positive Week 53 - Opportunities

As luck would have it, there were 53 Fridays in 2016, so we got an extra challenge. The quote was short: "1 year = 365 opportunities." I decided to do another mandala using the flower of life and used the colours of the rainbow seeing as how I had 7 flowers inside the circle. I changed the quote slightly to read: "365 days of opportunities = one year of creativity."

Kylie (the new owner of Lulu Art) also posed the question - What would you do if you couldn't fail?  So, I answered that with another journal page.

I've been experimenting with textured backgrounds starting out with napkins glued to the page, which are then covered in paint usually in analogous colours. Then I dry brush metallic colours - gold, silver or bronze - to catch the raised bits. It comes out looking a bit leathery. This one was a bit of a fail - the burnt umber was too dark and stood out from the other colours - so I used it as the background for my page.

Journal 52 Week 50 - Fire & Ice

Again with the mandala - I am really enjoying this art form, although it is very time consuming and colour choice can be a pain. I spent some time looking for images of fire and ice before embarking on this design. Of course, the obvious images work the best - flame and snowflake - with warm vs cool colours and doodling in gold & silver.

Let's Face It - Week 1

This week we looked at portrait mapping using circle/oval template with the face's proportions broken up into thirds & quarters. Kara showed us how to do a front facing portrait as well as profile and three quarter portraits. My first effort was 3 small faces on the same page - but they all leaned to one side. I think it was how I was sitting.

Later, I tried again in a larger format (and sitting properly) which worked out much better, although my profile portrait is too long in the face compared to the photo.

Let's Face It - Week 2

This week, we looked at using a grid to draw a portrait - this helps gives an accurate portrayal. (I'll have to try that profile portrait again using a grid!!)

Next, we drew around an image using charcoal or graphite then turned the page over and burnished the image onto a blank page. You have to rub really hard (using a bone folder or other similar tool) but you should get enough on the page to then draw the image and add all the details yourself.

I think this is a great way to practice and get used to drawing lots of different faces. This is the same girl as above but she is now the opposite way around!

And lastly, a free hand exercise using marks and shapes to build up an image. Kara wanted us to use only black and white charcoal to produce this image and show the play between light and shadow. I used the image that Kara supplied.

So far, I am loving these classes and exercises. Even when things go a bit wonky, it doesn't matter because I am creating and using muscles that have been dormant for about 40 years. Looking forward to the next lesson so much.

If you've got this far, thanks for reading my blog. I hope you have a good 2017 ahead and keep well. Cheers.

Mandalas and other things

I had lunch yesterday with my aunt and some cousins - mine and my father's - to celebrate my aunt's birthday (number 88). I had my great grandmother's photo album with me and we were able to add some names to faces, which means that I will be able to add photos to Dad's side of the family tree on Ancestry. I haven't done much work on my trees for a while - maybe I'll get motivated if my Dale cousins organise this family get-together they keep talking about.

Since the last time I posted, I have done a free online course on making mandalas - drawing them and colouring them. It was really interesting and I enjoyed the short lessons and was quite pleased with what I achieved. I posted some on Facebook and I think I got my niece interested - I know she spends lots of time with her partner's daughter doing colouring in and is really interested in art in general. You can see other courses at Julie Gibbon's website (http://www.juliegibbons.com/).

As well as learning about mandalas, I have completed a couple more mixed media challenges.

Lotus Mandala

The finished mandala followed by the coloured in version. I found my brush markers too dark for this, but you can see the flower structure clearly.

Concentric Circle Mandala

This was fun to do and would work well with Zentangle patterns. I'm going to try more of these, but I need a better compass first!

Hamsa

Julie showed us a really good way to draw this symbol of the hand. I think an eye in the palm is usual and after that you can put whatever patterns you like. I tried to keep it simple. This was coloured with a new set of markers - a better range of colours, but the tips were not as nice.

Colour Me Positive Week 47 - Enthusiasm

I love this one, especially the image which I found in a BBC History magazine - the article was about nudists in Germany!! I started with Distress stain over a mask and then glued on the b & w image. Using one of my favourite techniques, I painted in the scenery surrounding the girl and extending out from the photo. I did some outlining in pen to highlight the boat & the girl before writing the words on the opposite page.

Journal 52 Week 47 - #ARTISTSFORLOVE

I also love this page and am very pleased with it. The base is yellow oxide with phthalo blue, some magenta and a little phthalo green on top. I used one of Julie Balzer's stencils (a 6x6 TCW with 4 faces on it) and wiped off paint with a baby wipe. I did the same using a heart stencil and then used gold paint to stencil some butterflies on the page.

In my enthusiasm, I forgot to gesso the page so tore a bit of the page off when I was wiping away paint. To cover this I just cut a heart shape from a magazine picture & glued it in place. Then I just had to write out the manifesto with a white paint pen.

I've had a great week or so - done some good (I think!) pages, learned about a new art type and had a nice visit with some cousins. The cleaning lady came today so the house is clean - all I need to do now is tidy up. Getting the house into shape has been a long process and is still continuing - but I'm hoping to have everything shipshape by new year.

Keep well and ciao for now.

The missing bits - part 1

Wow, I only did one other Journal 52 between August & November, but managed four Mission Inspirations and nine Colour Me Positives! That means that I'm going to split my catch-up posts in two - one for J52 & MI, the other for CMP.

How on earth am I going to keep up next year when I have additional (paid for) tutorials to watch and then make art for - I may have to drop something. Anyway, here goes.....

Journal 52 Week 44 - Heritage

So the challenges this week were for a spread inspired by Halloween, or one for Day of the Dead honouring your ancestry. I went down the ancestry path because we don't really celebrate Halloween in Australia. I made a background using stencils with fleur-de-lis and shamrocks to indicate my French and Irish lineage. I drew the girl with acrylic paints and used some black and white paint pens for detail. I wrote surnames of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents in the girls hair,and added a couple of arrows to indicate the convict in my family's background.

Mission Inspiration - June

The hardest part of this month's challenge was finding some food can labels. I didn't want to use anything in my pantry, but I didn't really have any that I could "rescue" from the recycling. Luckily I had a small can of soup for lunch one day and then used a tea bag wrapper.

I wanted to make a page about the Murray Goulburn crisis where MG had not only lowered their prices for milk but had back dated it and forced many dairy farmers into debt. It was essentially a heartless decision by heartless men for heartless investors with no thought for the dairy farmers who started the co-op in the first place.

As one farmer said - management and executives of MG were either complicit in putting this particular strategy in place or were ignorant of it. Neither made them look like competent business people!!

I don't often get political - but this made my blood boil, especially since the man in charge then left with millions in his pocket - definitely COMPLICIT.


Mission Inspiration - August

Obviously using map fragments pointed towards a travel page or quote of some sort. I ripped up a map of Victoria for the first layer and used a butterfly from a colouring book with thread trailing out behind it. I think I missed step 8 - but who can tell?

Mission Inspiration - September

I think I did all the steps for this one, but did everything in the wrong order and my paint layer was way too thin and my girl does not stand out as well as she could. I used watercolour pencils for her face, acrylics for the feather stencils and StazOn ink pads for the stamps. It's all a bit of a mess!!

Mission Inspiration - October / Colour Me Positive Week 43 - Dreams

This month I completely missed the bit about using a baby wipe for the black gesso - so mine is painted on thickly. This was one month where I found it hard to fit everything into the design, so it all looks a bit messy - again! But, big bonus, I was able to use this for week 43 of the Colour Me Positive challenge.

Well that wasn't too bad - just the rest of the colour Me Positive pages to do now. I hope you enjoyed this post.

Cheers, Jenny.

Lots to catch up on

Well, since my last post I've been in hospital for an operation, had six weeks off work, gone back to work for three days a week instead of four, had my garden tidied up and found a cleaning lady. I've also completed lots of my mixed media challenges and signed up to "Let's Face It 2017".

I attended another cousin's funeral in September - very sudden heart attack, but on a brighter note, a couple of weeks ago, my sister and I went to another cousin's 75th birthday celebration.

Fabulous day had by all. She is quite blind so another cousin organized a petting zoo where she could hold the baby animals, and a didgeridoo player who demonstrated various didjeridoos and explained about how they were made and how that made them sound. A very unusual birthday indeed!

So first of all, hospital - I had a cyst on one of my ovaries, or so they thought. Turns out it was attached to my uterus, so I ended up having a partial hysterectomy. That meant at least six weeks off work, particularly as my job involves some medium to heavy lifting. It also involves no heavy work around the house - no lifting, carrying or reaching up! As I live on my own that was hard because you can't do very much without lifting, carrying or reaching for things.

Luckily I have a very nice sister-in-law who took me grocery shopping each week and the hospital social worker organised a cleaner and bed-maker for me (mattresses are heavy). I got to sit or lie around for most of the day reading, watching telly or snoozing.

While I was off work, the other cataloguers split my work between them and E who I replaced, came back two days a week to do one library. This was good because it meant that I could ease my way back into work for three days a week, which I am still doing as I cannot decide if I want to go back to four days or stay on three (if I can manage money-wise).

The garden was done by one my co-worker's sons - he is a landscape gardener but makes "pocket money" doing weeding and trimming for family and friends. Luckily, I qualify as a friend and he put in a good days work clearing the weeds, the overgrown shrubbery and hauling away the mess. Next project, the little bit of garden next to my garage - body corporate property but I want a say in what gets planted!!

This last week, I have completed five pages for various challenges which I will post here. Anything else I will catch-up on in a separate post.

Colour Me Positive Week 44 - Laughter

I decided on a collage for this one because I have not done one since I finished the A-Z collages. I downloaded some images from the internet and found more in magazines. One page had some spray ink on the edge, so I decided to paint both of them first. That just meant I had to wait for the pages to dry!

Colour Me Positive Week 45 - Attitude

The base for this page is some leftover paint applied with a brayer. As one of the colours was Burnt Umber, it was a bit dark and too brown. I lightened it up with some stencils and then because it was still a bit brown, decided to use the technique where you paint over most of the page - a favourite of mine as it hides a multitude of sins.

I spent part of my recuperation re-reading J.D. Robb's "... in Death" series which I just love. I have them all and every few years, I start at number one and work my way through all the titles to date. The main character, Lt Eve Dallas has a favourite saying that I think expresses attitude with a capital A - Bite me!

Journal 52 Week 46 - Dear Leonard

The challenge posted this week was to honour Leonard Cohen who had passed away the previous week, but I am not such a huge fan. However, last week Leon Russell also passed way and being a big fan and a contrarian, I changed my challenge to Dear Leon. I listed to a CD in the car and chose the song "If It Wasn't For Bad", because I knew I had some really gothic images in a fashion magazine I purchased a couple of weeks ago.

Colour Collages - Green

Lastly, I finally completed the first of my colour collages which I first decided to do back in July when I researched names for various different colours. The palm leaf kicked off the green theme, then I just found images in my Royal Auto magazines - they just keep giving and giving.

It has been a very productive week - just as well, because I need to make up for the lack of productivity in the past couple of months.

Another post soon with the rest of the challenges done since my last blog posting.

Hope you are all happy and well - all the best for now.