Diary of faces Georgette Chen

I've developed a real desire to become better at creating faces and found Sharon Tomlinson's online course 'A Diary of Faces', which gives detailed tutorials in producing realistic portraits. Using examples from artists, she examines how they create faces, teaching how to draw profiles, 3/4 views etc, as well as how to shade and layer paint and medium. Its more technical than some classes I've viewed and seems to suit where I'm at with my art.
Research is an element of each project and has given me a good excuse to brush up my art history! The first brief was to study Georgette Chen, (  1906-1993) a painter from Singapore, who broke the mould by becoming one of the first acknowledged female Asian artists.
This is the original I worked from:   


The eyes had very distinctive iris shapes and the nose presented its own challenges.I found the coiled hair quite tricky too. I followed the recommended palette but in retrospect probably should have made my own choices as I found the greenish tinge in the underpainting a little overwhelming. I still find working from dark to light counter intuitive after using watercolours!
I enjoyed finding out about other Chinese painters and discovered some great art in the process. Contemporary artist He Jia Ying and Pan Yuliang were two of my favourites.

The painting I've done has more depth than this photo suggests.
It appears here looking alot more washed out. I think I captured the steady gaze but the left eye begins too far from the bridge of the nose. I need to remember to photograph my sketches, so that I can
work further revisions from them.

This was my own composition as part of a journal page entitled Summer. I used the techniques learnt in Christina's tutorial but exaggerated the eyes and made the face longer and more chiselled.
I think the face is a little more contoured? I  wanted to create a goddess 'feel' in celebration of the Solstice and decided to give her a wreath of ferns, clover leaves and tiny daisies. I painted in a background halo shaped wash in 3 different greens and then over- stamped with leaf motifs. The daisies were painted in with white acrylic.
Again I used Neocolour watercolour crayons for the skin and facial features. The hair was coloured with Stabilo carbothello pastels and highlighted with Luminarte H20s. I was especially pleased with the violet wash I used under the skin tones and around the eyes and through the hair. An unusual choice but it worked giving her an ethereal glow.
What would I improve? The left eye is slightly larger! I loved doing this and am so inspired to practice further......

Learning to Draw

I've gone off at another tangent and have developed a yearning to improve my drawing skills. I have been playing around with Carla Sonheims 101 faces but to be truthful am not happy with button type eyes. I want
to be able to create bone structure using shading and eventually produce more of a likeness..... I spotted this free tutorial by Christina Zinnia on You Tube and thought I'd have a go.

I used a 3B and a 6B pencil to produce this; a torchon to blend and a kneadable eraser to add highlights. In retrospect, the face is a little wide and they eyes a touch to wide apart, but for a first effort not too bad. I was a little nervous about colouring it so preserved the sketch with a photograph.











I used Neocolour water soluble crayons and Aquarelle pencils to
finish my piece. The hair is a bit stripy but I'm pleased with the skin tones.

Sparkle

My art seems to have taken a back seat this week, as Ive spent a disproportionate amount of time rescuing my Birman cross Alexander, from trees, dogs, insects and the heat! Most of the projects involved lots of materials and he always seems to appear as the glue,glitter and paint come out. He seems especially fond of
licking irridescent ink!

My first piece involved creating a watercolour background using a wet on wet technique and then collaging a central flower using tissue paper. This was painted with metallic acrylic giving it a textural effect.

Dion Dior used stencil leaves and flowers for her backgrounds but I haven't got many, so I combined
them with stamps. I particularly likes the butterflys.
I added bubble wrap printed gesso areas for extra
interest and subtle accents of glitter glue.

I was pleased with the delicate colour scheme and composition which was shimmery but not gaudy.





Dion Dior continued to work over the above piece
adding several mixed media layers, acrylic 'frames', an all over stencilled pattern, transfer foil and tiny gems. I also added stamps of seed heads to give the composition a less blocky feel. The oranges, reds, golds and olives were chosen deliberately to move me away from my default 'bubble' or 'ocean' colours. I wasnt sure I liked this piece the whole time I was working at, finding it too abstract for my taste. Finally I grew to enjoy it as in the flesh it has alot of tones,texture and depth.

The next project was a spiders web and a return to a more delicate way of working with H2O's and Cosmic Shimmers. Again a wet on wet background, to create green foliage and impressionistic flowers. These were outlined with water colour pencils and highlighted with metallic acrylics. Salt sprinkled on the washed background had also added texture. The web spokes were bleached out using discharge paste but I didnt find this worked too well as it began to corrode the paper.
Finally the web was defined in glitter glue. I have a limited selection of this and would have liked to create finer lines.

My Beautiful Assistant

A roll of Fabriano paper makes a brilliant tunnel. I try to hide in it but make lots of noise rolling round the floor.
Before breakfast I had walked through a palette of orange acrylic paint and left footprints everywhere.
By lunchtime, my mistress had removed a bumblebee from my mouth but it was okay because I had already snacked on three flies. During the afternoon I disappeared for four hours and then had to be rescued from a tree where I tried to stalk a pigeon. Finally I savaged a neighbours hand when he tried to stroke me and then chased after his cat and dog.

I had enough energy left for a quick game of fetch, ate two saucers of chicken and had my bedtime pieces of toast. Then it was time for sleep in my basket. Its a hard life being a cat.....

Tomorrow I might be better behaved but my mistress did say she wanted a little character.
And she got one......