One From Column A and One From Column B, (Part Deux)

If thinking about all the work I did in the last post about 2014 didn't tire you, well, it tired me! And yet, that was just a minor part of the everyday art I was producing. Throughout the year I worked with two of my favorite teachers, Carla Sonheim, and Jane Davenport. Both have very different approaches to inspiration and education, but both equally committed to helping her students find joy in the work, and success in advancing her skills.

This was my second ""yearlong" with Carla, although I will admit that I only participated for the first half of the lessons, as frequent guests and travels took over my attention and time in the second half of last year. Carla's "Year of the Fairytale," was an intensive class in various processes of developing illustrations for any purpose, but specifically aimed at learning to illustrate children's storybooks. Having taken Jane Davenport's fantasy based "Joynal" the previous autumn, I assumed this would be the class to follow up. Unfortunately I was not a fan of the actual stories that are the basis for traditional fairy tales, and not as inspired as I thought I would be. What did inspire though was Carla's fantastic lessons in interesting new mediums and materials.

My "Happily Ever After" 

The first tale, "The Frog Princess" worked on character development. I chose to do for my three illustrations the princess, the princess as frog, and the magic bread. Each item was researched and drawn over and over to develop a character based in real life features, then stylized. We learned to layer pan pastels with water color for our final pieces.

Drawing and redrawing to refine and choose a character

Each of my three final pieces had lettering as an integral part of the illustration

The second tale, a traditional French story with many animals and plants to be illustrated, began with drawing 100 imaginary plants by looking at photo references of things that were not traditional land based plants, and using parts and pieces to make them fanciful. All our practice work this month was done in graphite on vellum.

One of several pages of my own designs for plants. I never made it to 100 because I got a bit carried away with the complexity of each.

The animal practice portion of the lessons involved using real life reference photos and using an "eraser" drawing method to subtract graphite for all the highlighted textures. This was a great deal of fun and much easier than the additive way of working from light to dark values.

The character, Bonne-Biche, in development

The final mixed media drawings were done on an unusual substrate called Yupo, which had a similar look to the vellum, but is made of polypropylene, and made for watercolor painting. The paint sits on the surface rather than sinking in and can be fashioned with the subtractive method as the erasure of graphite. It also pools and mixes on the surface and creates interesting areas of light and dark, not totally under control. The drawings were completed with pencil shading.

Here is my watercolor painting of Bonne-Biche.

For the character, Beau-Minon, I used a photo of my own cat as the basis for the eraser drawing on vellum.

And here is Beau-Minon in water color on Yupo.

The third story for which I completed my lessons was the very short and well know, "Princess and the Pea."  After creating a modern princess character for my story, I worked out my composition with the parts and pieces of her room in collage scraps. The favorite composition was then completed in paint on mixed media paper with unusual paint applicators such as a credit card.

It was a dark and stormy night when she knocked at the castle door.

The princess faces her challenge head on.

The one teacher I have acquired in the last two years who sees me through a creative session almost every day is Jane Davenport. She is one of the most joyful people I have had the pleasure to have met on the great big Internet, and her lessons have brought me such a long way toward feeling accomplished at drawing faces, telling stories, and being part of a community that creates for the sheer love of image and color.  

Jane has us make our own journals for most of her classes. This one, an epic and expensive book of good quality watercolor paper was mostly unused at the end of "Joynal," so....

I flipped it over and created another side for the "Express Yourself" class. It is still half empty and continues to be used for other Jane classes as needed.

The theme of "Express Yourself" is facial expression, most especially in learning to vary the eyes and mouths, plus the tilt of the head. We started with a gallery of miniatures of all the expressions we could think of.

Learning to tilt the head down and partially close the eyes for demure, shy, sad, etc.

A lesson in going beyond your comfort zone. After creating a beautiful calm face with lovely normal feature, we learned to overlay color and detail to create depth with glazing, and tell the story of a different sort of woman.

Pouty and kissy mouths, and a pouty face.

Mixed media on black gesso for drama

The altered book that I often work Jane's classes in was started for "Joynal" and is a child's fairytale book. Here is the start of a page of a broad smile with teeth based on a photo of Marilyn Monroe.

The mixed media Marilyn was pretty but a bit too soft and "chalky."

After a basic session in Photoshop, the colors sing! Jane offers a course called "Print and Scan" which teaches Photoshop basics along with many other aspects of refining and preparing artwork for printing and/or sale.

Probably my favorite finished page from the whole class. After an in-depth lesson in drawing an eye, I added the notes to the opposite page and the surround and gave the eye a trompe l'oeil torn page to peek through. 

An artist and teacher new to me, Danielle Donaldson, led a two week workshop in some new techniques on four very specific projects. "The Land of Light and Shadow" gave me a different perspective on what a class could be and four different completed projects in a short time.

"Anatomy of an Artist Taking Flight"

"Hippo Love, It's a Part of Us"

As Danielle's class rolled seamlessly into Jane's "Frolicaholic," the Creative Girl character was tweaked to become the cover of my Frolicaholic Journal.

"Frolicaholic," the expanded version of Jane's "Draw Happy" was offered live last spring, and was some of the most fun I've had in any of her classes. We made an awesome shaped book and filled each page (or page bits) with each week's new lesson in how to believe in yourself and your art.

"Building Confidence"

"Start the Art"

"The Lizard Brain"

"Your Style"

Meanwhile, back to work Jane's most basic class, "Supplies Me," which I had started the previous summer and was fitting in when I found the time.

In colored pencil week, I learned to draw with depth and texture, blending colored pencils

In marker week, I got a nice start with my Copic alcohol markers, then turned that drawing into a mixed media piece with collage and paint pens, ink and colored pencil.

A mixed media piece during a lesson on simple or "lolly" legs

Watercolor week: watercolor on texture paste (and always colored pencil!)

My ink week girl had a collage inspired friend, plus hair and dress from the scrap box.

For pastels week, a mixed media piece that used Shiva oil paint sticks (previously only tried for fabric painting)

And for acrylics week, a 3/4 turned face, my final painting of the class, and one of my proudest achievement of the year.

In just a couple weeks I will be beginning another intensive Jane class, brand new and based on her Amazon top rated new book: "Drawing and Painting Beautiful Faces." Won't you come join me?

What a Charming Face You Have

When I began 2013 with the drawing and painting of giraffe faces, I had no idea that by year's end human faces would become my passion and an almost daily part of my artistic journey.
When we last spoke (entirely too long ago because I am now obsessed with my daily drawing time), I was finishing my assignments with the mermaid themed class and getting ready to begin a series of drawing classes with the same teacher and creativity mentor, Jane Davenport. I was also beginning a yearlong commitment to two groups of artists I had only met online in the "Mermaid" class, to paint a themed page (or page spread) in their handmade journals once each month. For someone like myself, just beginning to study the ways of mixed media and storytelling with faces and figures, this was either pure madness or a crash course in learning to swim by jumping into a shark tank (same thing, I think.) Not that any of my classmates were less than lovely and supportive, but my own brain kept yelling: someone distract them while I climb out and run!

One of my first round robin journal spreads made use of a technique learned in Jane's "Mermaid Circus": photocopy a face you've previously done, glue to the new page, and paint over it. Saves time, gives you a staring point, and since you've probably grown your skills along the way, allows you to remake it into something different and hopefully improved. (This was adapted from my very first face, last shown to you in the April 29 post.) 

I had an inkling during the process of making my own two journal covers that I was going to really enjoy this monthly opportunity to do something brand new  based on whatever my favorite new techniques or themes were calling. I had learned about "one-liners" in several of Carla Sonheim's classes. You know, those drawings where you set pen to paper and don't come up for air until the sketch is complete. Your rules may involve not crossing or retracing lines or be open to whatever happens, but generally the idea is to let a simple flow of ink tell the story with as little complication as possible. I decided to do this for my own self portrait and then take it further with a technique from Carla's book "Imaginary Animals" called "Oaxacan Dotted Elephant," (except without the final coloring steps.) I just loved the result which is very much the spirit of me. The photo I used as a reference was then altered on the computer into a number of special effects, cut and collaged into a new me for the back cover. 

The cover of my international journal featured collaged and paint altered photos of myself spinning the "wheel of travel" to see where I would "virtually" journey next.

While all this new adventure was commencing, the "Year of the Giraffe" continued its monthly course. In July, we sculpted the giraffe in a medium of our choice. Considering my large stash of polymer clay from my jewelry making ventures, and the large number of canes I already had on hand, I decided to try my first sculpted clay piece. First came the base layer out of a block of beige, squeezed and finessed into shape all of a piece, nothing added or subtracted. This was then baked to a rigid condition and the design layer added.

My goal was to make the covering look like a giraffe's spots without being pedantic about it and without having to make any new canes. I turned a number of bulls eye canes into squared shapes, sliced them thinly and collaged the surface. I even used a scrappy "rose" that was made for a previous project as the eye and eyelid/lashes.

 To solve the problem of stability, I had left the area between the legs solid and now covered them with a "garden" of sorts as if the giraffe were standing in tall vegetation.

My completed sweet guy was named "Spot" and has gone on to star in two subsequent monthly projects. (Note that he has two differently spotted sides.)

In August, I finally got around to starting the Jane Davenport foundation class called "Supplies Me", which is an in depth review of all types of drawing and painting mediums melded with a basic drawing class. The first week, a focus on the use of gesso and journals, had us create a mixed media piece with glued ephemera, stamps and stencils or whatever we liked, and the first of the faces/figures we would be drawing throughout. Since I had just visited some newborn alpacas at a local farm and done some photography and quick sketches, I decided to create a simple portrait titled "Welcome, Baby!" Having drawn all those giraffes and last year some of the farm animals of Katherine Dunn, it seemed a natural thing to do.

 Being it was now August, and I had in hand the first of the round robin journals, it was time to make art for other people. One of the themes at hand was just Color!, and so I decided on a doodle of sorts that started with a stenciled image in black gesso, an amazingly dense dark black that just loves to be paired with colored pencils and acrylic paint pens.

The second page had no particular theme, so I went with a simplified version of a very complex page spread I had done for the Mermaid class. The mermaid and dolphins are all made by stamping images of my own homemade stamps on tissue, them applying them to the page with matte medium. They are then embellished with further color, mostly in colored pencil and white paint markers.

Back in week two of Supplies Me we were learning about colored pencils and drawing faces (yes!). This was the first simple sketch-along I did with Jane's video lesson.

 Next I took my journal out to the gazebo and worked up some more face types in colored pencil. I was feeling it come to me that I could really get into this thing.

 And finally, with paint blobs to add character, I took them further with more expression and detail.

The August giraffe was to be "photograf"ed! There were several options. The one shown here was "finding" a giraffe out in your daily wanderings. This poor fellow is titled "The Unfortunate Accident." Even though the auto has moved on, I can still visit him, as he is permanently adhered to a street nearby my house.

Since I don't live close enough to a zoo to just pop over for a photo shoot, the third option was to photograph a giraffe we had. Of course, Spot was the only choice and he was game for a little trip with Mom and Dad. The entire series, "Spot's Day Out", was a really fun photo shoot that unfortunately is only available at this time on my Facebook page. Here is a little taste.

Spot decides he'll sit on the dashboard on the way to lunch and shopping until Dad makes him get down.

Giving Dad the evil eye. (He hates being told what to do.)

The two make up over a great pizza lunch.

"More quarters, please!"

I want my own bag!

 Back in the "classroom," we were learning to draw the rear view and make that the subject of the week 2 mixed media piece. I had enough ideas for two different page spreads and used the inspiration of the colors on pages I had previously pre-painted with no particular project in mind. The first is a philosophical view of the short sweetness of life, the second a mix of fantasy and reality inspired by my time with the mermaids and a friend who is always full of the possibilities of life. 

Just as she is turning to face the "camera", so my art now is turning to the possibilities that can be found in a face. Stay tuned. More to come!