Sweetness: A Mixed Media Journal Page

This is the first double-page spread in my Goddess and Poet Moleskine journal. The idea is to shabbify (is that a word?) the background with layers of mixed media while still enhancing your goddess. Then you write a little poetry to accompany the mood of the piece.

I started out with a color palette of lime and raspberry, taken from the rub-on on the goddess' neck. Then it varied between pinks and greens and golds. I ended up having to paint her hair with Dr. Ph. Martin's Bombay White India Ink. It started out a pale lime green paint which was cool at first but then blended too much into the background. Then I added heavy layers of clear Gesso to give a lot of texture to the hair (and the background, too, while I was at it). Next I tried painting the hair with Silver Lumiere paint and a small brush. I didn't like that so I just painted over it all with the India Ink. I did like this. Ooh, I have a whole set of these...must paint with more of them!

Next, I wanted her eyes to be luminescent. I used Golden's Fluid Acrylic in the color Interference Violet. I am sold on the Interference colors; I'm getting them all. This photo below was taken at an angle so I could try and capture the iridescence of her eyes and the texture in the two pages from the Clear Gesso. You can click on the photo and get a better look at these:

So I'm playing around with the poetry in Photoshop first. When I decide on the final poem (or verse) I'll write that in with something, either a gel pen or one of the inks. I WISH I knew how to do Calligraphy. I have a how-to book and a beginner's set but have never really sat down with it and applied myself.

This workshop of Suzi Blu's is so much fun! All of the experimentation with the layers and layers and layers of paint, papers, inks, etc. really motivates me to start more pages and expand the journal even further! So I'll be working on these for awhile. I won't post all of them all of the time, but wanted to give you a peek at the journal work from the workshop. Tomorrow's lesson, when posted, will be the first of a two part series on working on the graphite portrait that's been applied to a wood support. I'm really looking forward to this one. I want to start working more with wood. I talked hubby into buying the 36" x 36" piece of birch plywood and he's been cutting it up into 6" x 12", 9" x 12" and 12" x 12" pieces for all of the art I've yet to make. :)

Now I've really got to get serious about the faux encaustic workshop canvasses I've started. The process looks to be so cool! I haven't forgotten about it...just been giving all of my time to these little goddesses! I hope to have something to show by the end of the week.

Magenta Muse

Still experimenting with the faces I'm drawing in Suzi Blu's Goddess and Poet workshop. I really liked this face but I couldn't draw any suitable hair for her. So I didn't give her any. She's been sitting in the sketchbook for awhile waiting for something to happen.

I just began another experiment in Photoshop: painting my sketches! Duh! The paint brushes are called that for a reason! You paint with them! I've never used them to paint my own art; only to "color" in images that I would use in a layer mask. I was in Barnes & Noble the other day browsing the digital art magazines and kept reading how the artists would scan in their art and paint it. It's not so easy with the mouse but I gave it a try.

This is why I love Photoshop: The photo below is what I started with (scanned from my sketchbook with a few adjustments so you can see it better).

The result at the top of the page is just my playing with painting her face, lips, etc. All of the elements in the finished product, except for the font, the face and the hair, come from the Somewhere Beyond collection at Scrap Artist.com. Love them for their cool elements!

I had this photo of these gorgeous flowers called love lies bleeding in my files. I thought how cool they would be as hair! Voila! Now I'm thinking I need one of those Wacom tablets to help me paint better (no pesky mouse to try to maneuver!). Hubby will have to be convinced first, though. He's already promised to get me the new version of Photoshop. A Wacom may be pushing it... ;)

As for the actual sketch, I think I'll adhere her to wood and work on her along with the other graphite face in next week's lesson, "The Portrait on Wood". Right now she's still in the sketchbook. And I'll always have her in the computer if I ever want to give her a new look. We'll see what happens.

Shine!

What to do if you spend hours shading your goddess with colored pencils and still don't like the result? Scan her into Photoshop, put her into a cool background, embellish a little and then you won't have to throw her away! Plus, you really don't want to start ripping pages out of your new Moleskine do you?

Ugh! I worked on this one for a long time trying to get the shading just right. I'm okay with most of the colors even though I have a LONG way to go before I will get the result I want. But when I finished, I stepped back and looked at her. I'm just not that into her. ;) Her proportions are all wrong, her face is too long, I should make this a song... blah, blah, blah. So I put her into a digital world and now she's much more goddess-like placed there in the heavens.

I scanned her into the computer, made her a PNG file and used the Hard Light blending mode to give her the look I wanted on that background. Much better. And what a cool background! It's from the Gloaming collection at Scrap Artist.com. Love it!! Then I added a few embellishments from some other digital files and now she can shine!

Here she is in the bare Moleskine state:

Not too hot. I learned a lot from the mistakes of this one. So I'll keep practicing...drawing and shading until I get it right. Hopefully by the end of the workshop I'll have created something I love. The next lesson goes up tomorrow. We will be embellishing our journal backgrounds. Then in the final two weeks we will work with the goddesses that we did only in graphite. Mine was posted a few postings back. I really like her and hope I don't mess her up. She's now covered in a layer of clear gesso and mounted to wood ready for ... whatever the lesson will have us do!

Now, back to the sketchbook. I did draw a goddess last night that I'm kind of liking...we'll see where this one takes me. :)

Portraits and Goddesses

We are only on Lesson 2 of the Goddess and Poet workshop but I wanted to show what I've been working on. These portraits are done in a Moleskine sketchbook. I LOVE the soft paper and the buff color. First we were to sketch a goddess and use minimal shading with the graphite pencil. Then we were to lightly color over the graphite using only creams and browns for the face/hair and reds for the lips. We will add more to these pages later. We were just to sketch and color.

For this next goddess we were to sketch her in and do only a few lines of graphite shading. Then we were to color her with the pencils gradually building up the layers. I'm not too crazy about this one but it's all part of the practice. Then we were to color in her hair a base color. I'm in love with Golden's Iridescent Bronze Fluid Acrylic so I colored her hair in that. I need a lot more practice on the building up around the eyes and the cheek area.

The next lesson will be posted Wednesday and we will be adding more to the backgrounds of these pages. For the final two lessons we will work with the first portrait that I posted a while back (the goddess done only in graphite) that is mounted onto wood.

I've also done some work in an art journal that I'm having a little success at maintaining! Still pulling together images for the faux encaustic collages and will post those when I have something to show. That's it for today.

Goddess Sketching

Yes, I've been busy with the workshops! I've been sketching and erasing for two days now but I think this is the face I'll use for the Goddess and Poet workshop. I am still working on the shading and have a few more things to do before I put this onto the wood panel. It's coming along and I've made progress since my first sketch.

We had to start out making a gray scale (8 boxes that go progressively from white to black), a sphere (with 4 shades in it plus a shadow) and crosshatching. So I did that for a couple of days. Then we were to try a face. I really liked the first one I did until I watched her videos again. Then I decided to forget that one and try again. It's all practice, practice, practice but I'm getting the hang of it.

I loved the faux encaustics workshop, too! I watched all of the videos and have four canvasses gessoed and ready for collage. Hope to have something to show in the next few days. That's it for now. I wanted to post this while I still had the courage. ;)