Sunday, September 11, 2016

A Face and Its Remnants (9.11.2016)


After the change with yesterday's face in doing a digital piece, I'm back to mixed media. As you can probably see from the sporadic nature of this blog, I don't like to feel tied down to one medium when it comes to my artwork. I feel like I learn more when I'm constantly learning and practicing new things. 

However, with this piece in particular, I'm working on cardboard again, and for this series in particular I'm sort of attempting to stay with a vaguely similar style for the pieces. This is the first time I've really worked in a series like this (and there's a bit of a secret to it, I'd be curious to see who'll guess first), so I'm really excited about it. 

I'm also particularly happy with today's face (face 12/29 for 29 Faces), so without further ado, let's move on to talking about it.



  • I'm sort of in love with the tones in this face. I used a lot of pinks and yellows and blended with brown and just the tiniest bit of white. After the tones in the face had started to come along, I didn't really feel the need to brighten it up too much. It just felt like if I added anything too crazy, it'd be overwhelming. So, I stuck with muted colors overall, adding a few pops of orange in her lips and the flower. The colors are pretty much my favorite part of this painting.
  • In the photo on the left, you can see the hairstyle a bit better. It didn't turn out quite as I was expecting, but I'm okay with it. However, the hairstyle was the inspiration for the piece - my sister was wearing her hair like this the other day and I couldn't resist.
  • Then we come to the right hand photo. The texture here is crazy. I'm pretty sure that every time I paint on cardboard I comment on the amazing texture, but I just can't help myself. It's incredibly fun to mess around with, and I think everyone should try it at least once. We all have boxes lying around that are waiting to be thrown away - why not cut one down and give it a go?




 I'm not really going to expand on these photographs too much, but they're both from my Instagram story; if you're interested in seeing more progress shots, I've been posting a lot of them there lately.

  • As you can see, the first photograph depicts my rough sketch - and when I say rough, I mean extremely rough. My sketches are purely guidelines, I don't try to overthink it too much. In the long run, they're going to be mostly painted over anyways, so I can make adjustments with paint.
  • The second photo is after some paint had already been applied. Typically I'll go over the skin tones again with a second pencil outline, more defined and to give me a chance to actually outline with the black paint like I've been doing for this series.




The second mixed media piece I have to share with you guys today is probably the first finished art journal page I've actually done since I started the 29 Faces challenge (you can see the traces of my first face on the edge of the page above).

Essentially, it went something like this. 

Lately, once I'm finished painting faces, I have a random assortment of colors on my palette, since it's much easier to apply them there when I'm painting a portrait. A lot of time this leftover paint goes to waste, since I don't always use it and it dries out. I was getting tired of that happening, so I decided to create a journal page to use it all up. 


Since the  colors I used for the face were very autumn-like, I decided that it might be fun to participate in the "colors of autumn" challenge over at Stamps and Stencils. So that's what this page was created for!

  • When I was sorting through some of my art supplied recently, I found some old rubber stamps I had forgotten I owned, the leaves stamped throughout the page. Only one is clearly visible, but there is a second, more narrow leaf stamp you can see if you look closely.
  • In the photo on the left, you can see one of my favorite little portions of the page. Here, the layers haven't been built up as much as in some other areas of the page, and the lines of the composition book and some pencil doodles I did on the very first layer shine through.
  • On the right, you can see a bit of a cluster towards the bottom of the page. I love this little section too - I thought this page was a lot of fun to create. There are book pages torn and glued to the background, splatters, Prismacolor NuPastels (which I recently rediscovered in my stash and am enjoying experimenting with again), and more. 
  • The quote reads "You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself."


The photos above really just depict closer views of the above photographs, so the descriptions are the same. That doesn't change the fact that I love them!

One last thing before I go. I have a Facebook page where I've been sharing a lot of what I do here, but I feel like a Facebook group has so much more potential than that. So here's my question - do any of you have anything that you love to see? Maybe prompts, discussion questions, or anything along that vein that you'd like to participate in? Because I honestly think it could be a lot of fun.

At any rate, I hope you all enjoyed this post and I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

5 comments:

  1. Fabulous pages! I love the colours and layering as well as that brilliant quote! Thankyou for joining us over at Stamps and Stencils. Toni x

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    1. You're so welcome! I had a lot of fun creating this page, and I thought that the quote fit the page well. I'm glad you like the page!

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  2. This is such a gorgeous page with such amazing texture and color! Thank you so much for sharing with us at Stamps and Stencils for our Colors of Autumn challenge. Hugs, Autumn

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  3. What a fabulous background, gorgeous layers of colour for our autumn challenge. Thanks so much for joining us at Stamps and Stencils. Ruth x

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