Having Fun With Faces

I am still working on new faces, and new techniques for them while participating in the Face to Face workshop.  What a fabulous experience this has been!  I'll first just catch you up on what I've created.

The above was a charcoal sketch which I then added gesso to in order to blend the marks.  It was an interesting technique.

This was done first as a background (one of several I created ahead of time) on which I layered extra heavy gel medium (in the tutorial, Misty used modeling paste but I didn't have any in my studio at the time), and before it dried, I scratched the background texture and the face into it with a wooden chopstick.  Then when it was dry I painted black India ink over the entire surface and rubbed most of it away except for what was in the grooves and some of the shaded areas. Interesting to do!

This painting was started by using a reference photo and just painting (in acrylics) the shadow areas first without doing a pencil sketch first.  I wanted to try my hand at doing a male face again. I like how this turned out!

When I created the background above with the gel medium, I also had created some other backgrounds with gel medium.  This was one of them that also had some papers collaged to it and then gesso over it before I added some paint to it.  I painted this face on top of that (after it had dried thoroughly). This was also acrylic paint.

This one was really fun - I sketched the basic face with a Stabilo Marks All pencil and then used some of the Neocolor II water soluble oil pastels, using bright colors and not really caring about whether or not the colors were "realistic".  Hence the blue hair and yellow and reddish skin tones. Then I blended with a wet brush and also used some white acrylic paint, which served to tone things down a bit here and there and also blended colors.  I was attempting to be more abstract, but it turned out to be only the colors were more abstract or stylized.

As you can see I have been busy painting and not taking much time to blog.  I have a few more faces done, but I will save those for another day and count them up to see how I'm doing on the 29 Faces 2013 challenge. I think I am a few behind on that.  

As if I didn't have enough challenges, I also declared myself a participant in a "Painting a Day for 10 Days" challenge given by Gritty Jane (Jane Spakowsky) on her Facebook profile.  Well, I might as well, right?  I am painting a lot more now so it made sense.

I'm so glad to be back creating in my studio after a week's slow-down due to fighting a head cold virus.  I'm still sniffling and sneezing, but my head is clear enough to be creating too. Thank heavens!

Thanks for reading. Next post up will be more about the painting a day challenge and beginning to paint in oils again!

Creatively yours, 

Arlene