Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Faces (x5)

Yay! More faces. I'm still behind as well as just behind on posting, but I do hope/plan to get through the 29. It just won't be by the end of Feb....


16 - black China marker on a paper bag. I'm somewhat irritated with this one. I wouldn't have done the line on the cheek the same way and I seem to reliably make eyes too large. The shape of the face was pretty accurate.

17 -  pen doodles on a scrap piece of paper at work....

19 -  Single line sewing face on single piece of muslin. I had been wanting to do this one for a while, but then I dropped super hot water on my foot and couldn't use my sewing machine for a while. Yay!

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

29 face, the fourth

Woo! With these 4, I'm officially over halfway through the 29 faces!


12 - blind contour drawing (this was actually the second... the first is kinda visible on the other side), pencil on printer paper

13- and a non-blind non-single line contour drawing of the same subject..... amazing what looking at the paper does and does not change! Same pencil on printer paper

14- face only version of Exquisite corpse that my boyfriend and I worked on on the same printer paper with pencil

15- inkblotish/fold paper in half painting technique. I used a paintbrush and sloped the paint on. I went over some areas a couple of times, but only painting on the left side and then folding to fill in on the right. Acrylic paint on printer paper

Monday, February 17, 2014

29 faces, group 3!


Yay! More faces! More experimentation!




9 - white grease (China) pencil on black cardstock: A birdie mentioned to me "It's February & February is black history month.. Are you going to celebrate it in your faces?" So with that seed and spotting my white China marker, I decided I'd try out the white on black sort of drawing. This is a technique I hadn't tried out myself, but remembered talking to an artist at the Hive at the downtown LA artwalk about it. I don't know if it's because I haven't done it before and therefore required relying on different points of reference, but it felt way more like sculpting than putting black pen on white paper to draw does...I really like the result!

10 - Oil Pastels on cardboard cracker box. I'm not sure if it was the material combo or the fact I was using "children's" oil pastels, but after blending them with my finger, I had way more on my finger than I had hoped.

11- slick neon tulip paints on gessoed cardboard cracker box. I bought the paint set with a 75% discount at michel's because the orange was missing. At first I tried drawing with only lines, but I  managed to smear some of the nice lines and I was a little frustrated with the lack of orange since I was only using the nozzles on the bottles to paint and therefore couldn't really mix colors, soooo that's when blending some of the paints with my finger came in. Some moments I think this face is "bleeeeh" and others I think he is awesome!


Wednesday, February 12, 2014

29 Faces, part 2!

Although it's not a rule, I've started a trend of trying out different approaches/materials for each face. On one hand, I think it would be interesting to do this for all 29 faces, I also have reservations about it. For now, I'll try to keep up with it, but who knows.... Some of these techniques worked out better than others, but I'm glad I tried everything that I did! I definitely want to try some of them out again at some point.

5 - nothing but layers and layers transferred from the Gelli plate on a book page with acrylic paint. This was the better of the 2 prints... it was way more challenging than I had anticipated for the result to not turn out crazy.

6 - super quick pen drawing on notebook type paper. I did this on the bus in maybe 2 minutes.

7 - painting on top of a magazine page with acrylic paint. I kinda feel like this is cheating since I painted directly on an ad, but then again, it makes me think of use of the camera obscura, which I think is in my brain after listening to a segment on Science Friday about "Tim's Vermeer" last weekend. Once you start painting on the page, you lose some of then color/lighting cheats.... Still, I'm happy how it turned out.

8 - collage made from pieces I had laying around from some things I was recently working on. I used all of the pieces as they were and didn't trim or cut any of the pieces.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

29 faces, 2/14, the first

Last month I stumbled on this 29 faces challenge... essentially you create a face of some sort every day for February (+1, this year). I then proceeded to forget about it until February 4th.  I've been playing catch up as a result. Who knows if I will make it to 29, but I already have 4. I figured this wouldn't be a bad thing for me to try out since I don't really create faces all the time. As it turns out, it's much easier to make a weird face than a proportioned face, but so far it's already made me try out some new stuff, so I think that's good. We shall see if I can keep this up!

1 - acrylic painting on a gelli print on a phone book page

2 - gelli print/ stamp made from scratched mushroom container on a gelli print on a phone book page with acrylic paint

3 - first time playing with Gelatos, blended with my finger on another phone book page

4 - pen drawing on cardstock

Monday, February 3, 2014

infinite rectangles




..ok, not infinite, but I think it took me about a week to finish the first Gelli print. I'd add a layer and realize that nope, it wasn't done yet. I'm not sure how many layers of rectangles I added before I finally knew it was done, but it was worthwhile. I'm really happy with the end result. The second was an attempt at the same technique as the first, but it didn't quite work, so I took it in a different direction.....