Daily Sketch - Bluebirds

A couple of bluebirds, sketched from a random image I found online.



BONUS SKETCH
Yesterday, after posting my dress sketch, I felt like drawing a bit more, and she emerged. Isn't she cute?

Daily Sketch - Dress on Form

Hey! I'm finally putting my Pinterest pins to use! Here's today's sketch, based on a dress I pinned just today.



Just a note. The sketchbook shown here is just a little 4"x6" book I can keep handy. I won't be using it for all of my daily sketching, but it's a great size to take anywhere.

Sketching

I've decided that I'm going to do a sketch a day for November. I know some use this month to write a novel, grow facial hair, or express gratitude each day. I have only fleetingly longed to scribe a novel, have no interest in encouraging my facial hair growth (even for a good cause), and really like the idea of practicing gratitude, but I thought I'd use it to push myself into the habit of sketching daily. No grand schemes for creating a masterpiece, just whatever strikes my fancy at the time.

Since I'm getting a late start posting (but have actually sketched on each of the three days so far comprising this month), I'll post all three today.

November 1: Holding On

Just a girl I felt like drawing, flowy dress and hair, just holding on.

November 2: Red Carpet

I drew her face and she seemed like a starlet, so I added the glamorous dress and little clutch. I love her "finger waved" hair.

November 3: Balloons!

I had an image on my fashion illustration inspiration board and finally decided to put it to use. So cute!

Art Journal Play - Seeing Faces

In case you hadn't figured it out already, I love to draw faces. That's been true since high school. I would lose myself sketching stylized faces. I went a very long time without putting pencil (or paint) to paper but never lost the pull to draw faces.

Having immersed myself back in art over the last year and a half has reminded me of that pull. I've taken various on-line art courses that have me drawing more and more faces, specifically I Heart Drawing by Jane Davenport. Love her, LOVE this course.

I have a couple of art journals going, and in most, I have half-finished backgrounds mostly the result of slapping my leftover paint on a page as not to waste it. This is one such page. I was flipping through the book, saw this page and thought it would be fun to paint a face over the top. I wish I'd gotten a shot before I worked on the face, but you can see quite a bit of it through the face.

I'm mesmerized by her. Sure, her eyes are a bit wonky and she's rather lopsided, but I think she's darling, if I do say so myself!

Finished – Untitled (for now) Woman

I finished it - finally! I wrote a WIP post way back in April (!) and am happy to say she's finally finished.

Some of the WIP:

(where I left off on the last post-following is later in the day after fixing her nose)

I anguished over where to go from just about the point I left her in late April. I knew I wanted paper flowers either in her hair or representing her hair, but kept putting off making the decision. I was afraid of "ruining" what I'd started.

So I made paper flowers.

Lots of paper flowers.

And after determining that I did NOT want her whole head covered in them, came up with a pleasing arrangement, took a photo so I'd know what I'd liked...

Then set about painting her hair. I also decided to add some stenciled, if illegible, words to the background. I just wanted to break things up a bit, add some more texture and interest, pull in more of the mixed media feel I was going for.

The inspiration photo I used showed some sort of barrette in her hair, so I fashioned one for my girl out of wire and a paper flower. I also added a wire "earring" to help tie things together.

The flower "eye" is made from light modeling paste and a flower stencil. I'm very pleased with how she came out even though I got very stuck for a long time. I needed to let go of feeling like I was going to "ruin" it or make a mistake. As Donna Downey says, "Forward motion." Just keep moving forward and the right things will emerge.

Workshop Journaling – "Never Stop Growing"

So I have this bad habit of signing up for workshops and puttering out about 3/4 of the way through - or sooner. In this case, much sooner. I signed up for the Art of Wild Abandonment class with Junelle Jacobsen and Christy Tomlinson, and it's SO PACKED with information that I got a rather overwhelmed and stopped watching the videos and doing any work with the workshop assignments. It's a good problem to have in a workshop, I admit - so much information. I've loved everything we've done so far and I'm not even through week 2. It's a 3 week class, but don't let that fool you. There are at least 3 projects each week and about 10 videos. Each. Week. You might see how I got behind!

ANYway. I made a promise to myself to get back to the videos and get messy again with my art journal. I've neglected it in a terrible way. I want to create more often (every day!) and want to practice lots of different techniques, and one of the ways to do that is dust off my art journal, grab my laptop and supplies, and get the most from the Art of Wild Abandonment workshop.

Today I did just that and had the MOST fun with this page. Ahhhh. It's good to be back.

Materials used:
Gesso
Inktense pencil
Acrylic craft paint
Pen
While poster paint pen (Sharpie brand)
Distress ink
Roller word stamp
Various papers
Brown paper bag
Punchinella/sequin waste

Quick Tip – Using Partially Dried-out Modeling Paste

This is something I accidentally discovered today when I went to use my modeling paste on a work in progress. There was a big blob of paste on the edge of the jar left from the last time I'd used it where I'd scraped the leftover paste. Obviously I should have stirred the leftovers back down into the jar because that blob had dried out... but not all the way. I pulled it out to throw it away, but when I grabbed it, I realized it was the consistency of clay or play-dough.





*lightbulb*







I squished it together, grabbed a stamp, and pushed it into the paste. I'll let it air dry then have it on hand for a future project. Ta-da! Fun dimensional piece using materials I had on hand and was just going to throw away.

This is the original stamped piece I made with the large blob of paste. The one with the word stamp was done with paste I scraped from around the top edge of the jar using a pallet knife. As you can see, I use paint on my stamps and don't clean them very much. Ahem.

So, if you happened to have some mostly dried-out bits of modeling paste, give this a shot! You can attach the dried piece to a canvas or journal page, paint over it, layer with it - whatever you want.

*Just be sure you use LIGHT modeling paste because it will be flexible when dried and much easier to work with than regular or "heavy" modeling paste – that kind is very brittle when dry.