Rainbow Art Journal – Red Column Woman

Someone asked me recently if I ever return to past works and have another stab at them in order to apply sharpened skills or a more developed style.  I do return time and again to certain subjects – zombies, Red Riding Hood, skeletal elements, mythology – but I don’t generally have another crack at a past artwork.  I thought, however, that maybe it could be an interesting exercise to take a few works in a medium I am more comfortable with -namely ink and watercolour – and try depicting the exact same subject using mixed media.  I decided to use some of my illustrations from my 100 Faces challenge.

First up for the experiment was my 85th drawing in the series, which I had titled “Confidence”.  I chose it largely because I was working in the red section of my Rainbow Art Journal and I had remembered how much I liked the effect of the bold red ink pooling and puddling.  I also chose it because it was an illustration I actually really liked in the series.  I lost the more diagonal composition, which I definitely prefer, and I think the new version of the face looks more sullen and bored than confident.  I am also not happy with that busy, blotchy background and may paint that out at some stage.  However, as first experiments go, it is not such a failure that I will abandon the whole enterprise.  Not just yet anyway.

Girl with Antlers

Last week’s Life Book lesson was taken by Annie Hamman.  I really love Hamman’s paintings and enjoy watching her process but it is a style and methodology I can never get to work for me as I am neither painterly or loose enough in the way I handle paint.  I have, therefore, really enjoyed the previous Annie Hamman lessons I have worked on but I always end up with something much more rigid and controlled than the anticipated outcome.  This lesson was no exception.

I enjoyed all of the techniques deployed in the lesson, such as painting over collage and painting negative space, but I was neither intuitive or loose enough in my mark making.  That’s OK though.  That way of creating just isn’t me.  What was disappointing was that my choice to use blue for underpainting and layering up the shadows of the face didn’t dissipate enough in subsequent layers and the flesh tones ended up sallow and sickly looking as a result.  (Incidentally, the phone photo makes the colours much paler than they are in real life because the light levels have just been so dreary here lately.)  I am, however, happy with the negative painting around the antlers, the pushing back of and forward from the collage layer, and the gold of the halo.  I think this is another one of those lessons I will attempt again, perhaps in my art journal, as I liked the approach and have hopefully learned something from the underpainting oops.

Galaxy Girl

My response to this week’s Life Book lesson is an example of my commitment to share my art work from that course whether I like the outcome or not.  The lesson was taken by Susana Tavares and was about illustrating with watercolour and adding finishing details with pen.  It was a lesson that should have been comfortably within my wheelhouse but somehow I still went wrong.  I started with the face and struggled to render decent flesh tones.  I think I went too heavy with the ochre for the shadows, I didn’t maintain enough white paper for highlights, and I didn’t get the pinks looking rosy enough.  The hair was completed using a wet in wet technique and I definitely overdid it as it all feathered and bloomed more than I intended.  Straying from the exemplar in the tutorial, I decided the hair could be like the night sky, and I decided to string the planets from our solar system around her neck like a beaded necklace.  It was not a well thought through execution of the concept.  I don’t think it was a coincidence that I was completely over-scheduled and exhausted this week.  For me, art is a useful counterpoint to a stressful week but that does not mean the product is always as worthwhile as the act of creation itself.

Pearl Girl

Last week’s Life Book lesson was one I really struggled with.  I had never taken a lesson with Lindsay Weirich so it was great to see a different approach to art demonstrated.  The lesson involved using pearly paint and gouache.  I have a little of the former but none of the latter so I improvised and used other media.  Stenciling was involved and I suck at stencilling but I decided to force myself to not skip that stage.  It started well enough with a pleasing blend of blue, pink, and yellow pearl paint; but then it entered an ugly phase and – when I tried to rescue it –  into an even uglier phase until it looked like sparkling sewage.  It took layer after layer of paint and more time and effort than I actually had available to try and eliminate the glittery poop stage and haul it screaming and kicking back into something half decent.  Then, frankly, I was all out of time and all out of willingness to invest in this one piece.  Time to stop flogging the dead horse and move on to new and less poopy pastures.

Rainbow Art Journal – The Girl with Words in her Hair

Thanks to a weekend that for once was not crammed with activities or commitments, I found time to work in my colour themed art journal.  I am still in the black/monochrome pages and this time I wanted to play around with using the black and white of printed text.  Readers who follow both my blogs might recognise the model for this page as being a drawing – titled Aubrey because of Aubrey Beardsley – from my series of 100 Faces.  I thought it would be interesting to see if I could recreate a face I had illustrated in ink and watercolour using acrylic paint and collage.  There is definitely more precision in the ink drawn version but I am not displeased with the way this mixed media piece turned out.  I do like the hair made of book pages so that was a worthwhile experiment.

Spring Girl

This week’s Life Book lesson was taken by Misty Mawn.  Misty Mawn is a mixed media artist I had heard a lot about so it was fun to experience a lesson with her and learn what her approach to art is.  Hers is a much looser, much more painterly, much more intuitive style than I know I am capable of so the lesson really dragged me out of my comfort zone.

This is one of those pieces I regret not taking progress shots of because at no stage did it ever resemble or even predict what it was going to end up looking like.  My initial sketch was actually a self-portrait (without glasses) and actually a rather good one so I wish I had thought to take a picture of that.  It was, however, never my intention for the final painting to resemble me.  Instead I was using my face as scaffolding to underpin the other layers.  As soon as I started applying paint, with a large brush, the quality of the drawing disappeared and it became a mess.  I was not happy with either my mixing of flesh tones nor my mark making with the brush.  It was a complete and utter mess and I seriously doubted in my ability to refine that layer enough to make it worth persevering with and progressing.  I managed to refine it a little more by switching to a medium brush and by improving the flesh tones but it was definitely in the “ugly stage” by then.  I admit that it was then that I threw in the towel.  I could not get the painting to emerge as anything worthy of escaping the trash bin using a painterly, loose approach and acrylic paint.  What I decided to do, therefore, was use other media and revert to my drawing skills to pull out the facial details and make the painting cohere.  That saved the day and saved the piece from going in the bin.

As an aside, the green and pink colour scheme definitely speaks to my longing for Spring.  I am so done with Winter and its bleak, grey, dull days.

Negative and Positive Figure

Last week’s Life Book lesson was taken by Donna Downey.  It was all about being playful with colours and mark making, and layering with paints and shapes, to create a colourful and abstract piece.  I managed to keep my control freakery in check and let my inner child go wild with colour but I maybe got a bit carried away and the result was a tad messy.  I also struggle with creating abstract art because I get too stuck in my head and end up with strong visual ideas that lend themselves to more representational or figurative art.  That was precisely what happened with this piece too.  I, therefore, just went with it and produced a more whimsical female figure whose form contains the shapes of a whale’s tail, leaves, and a heart while the space around her head contains two birds.  I always enjoy painting negative spaces so that the background becomes the positive image so that was the element of this lesson that really appealed to me and made me feel relaxed.

Red Headed Girl

It may have taken me a week to view and then work through the final lesson of the Let’s Face It course but I got it done and, therefore, despite having skipped a few lessons, have completed the course.  I feel a mixture of accomplishment and relief.  I feel relief because trying to stay on top of all my art commitments while solo parenting and working has become a bit of a source of pressure, another thing to cram into my already bulging schedule.  But mostly I feel like I have achieved something by undertaking and completing this course over the past 12 months.  When I compare the faces I was painting in January with those I am painting now, I definitely think there has been an improvement in my ability to construct faces – still a lot of progress to be made but definite steps in the right direction.  I have also learned a few more techniques and approaches with painting and mixed media to keep experimenting with and developing.

This then is my response to the final lesson of the course.  I thought I would share a few progress shots since I actually remembered to take some for once.  I can see that the eyes started off slightly different sizes, a flaw that was magnified as I added each new layer so that finally the eyes have ended up pretty wonky.  Otherwise, however, I am fairly happy with this painting so I get to end on a positive note.

 

Resting Acrobat

Last week’s Let’s Face It lesson was taken by Kara Bullock and amazingly – thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday – I was able to start and complete the piece within the span of one day.  The purpose of the lesson was to draw a full figure in a seated position with the face and hands particularly prominent in the piece.  As I am prone to do, I deviated from the lesson a little in order to a) save time and b) make it more me, but I used most of the techniques demonstrated in the lesson and kept to the spirit of the lesson.  I decided my figure looked like an acrobat as a rest so that then suggested the bold colour scheme.  I like the combination of red and turquoise so I was happy to break out that colour palette again.  While the nose got bigger and broader the more I worked on it and the hand is rather underdeveloped, I am fairly pleased with how this painting turned out – especially because I got it done and dusted in one day.

 

Frost

The only upside to my husband working out of town all week is that it freed up my evenings for some art time which meant that for the first time in what feels like ages I actually managed to complete two art lessons, one for each of the year long courses I am enrolled in.  The Let’s Face It lesson was taken by Annie Hamman and was about painting a figure with hands in addition to painting the face.  Hamman’s approach to painting is very, well, painterly.  It’s fascinating to watch the way she builds up and refines that layers of paint so that precise features gradually emerge.  I, however, am not remotely painterly in the way I handle paint.  Despite having had regular practice since I first started exploring mixed media, I still have super limited skills when it comes to handling, manipulating and applying acrylic paint.  Try as I might, therefore, I just could not refine the paint layers adequately enough so I diverged from the lesson (having already skipped a collage layer to save time) in order to use some other media to add the detail to the face and fingers.  Looking for the positives, I am fairly pleased with how the hands turned out in this painting.  I think the scale and angles read as correct.  I took the photo of the finished painting with my phone rather than my DSLR so in reality the flesh tones are a bit warmer and the disc behind the head is metallic blue.  My 11 year old commented that she looked like a female version of Jack Frost so I decided to go with that interpretation and title this piece Frost.