Mixed media art process photos, The girl with rainbow freckles.

So the other day I was sitting around in the middle of a huge spurt of creative energy, and I thought I wonder if you can make splatter, painterly style rainbow freckles. Now in your head I imagined taking a larger brush with a rainbow of paint and splattering it all at once. This wouldn't work, I didn't try.so for fear of failure buto also because my favorite place to experiment is in my journal, I got my journal out and made up a face and tried it out. I have no idea how the girl in my journal ended up so.... red. I intended to create a rather dull greyish face and add the rainbow of freckles as contrast. But honestly, I'm awful at keeping things neutral. The spray of colors turned out.... ok? But not what I wanted, so I added some neon pen freckles to brighten her up.

This is my journal page practice! 

Today I made it my mission to recreate her, in small form, for my wall or to sell on etsy possibly with the other 6 by 6 paintings I'm doing. I have never recreated anything before, I'm not a planner, I tend to work intuitively, and it's hard! So I opened up my journal and set the first one next to me. I opened up my photo inspiration board on pinterest and found a face I liked and I got to work. I started out again trying to make a grey face, which didn't work in the end. In this face I only used three paints. A premixed red that had a couple different tones, paynes grey and black. I used a rainbow of color for the splatters and a red, grey and black colored pencil for details, white pen and green for her eyes. That's it!

First is the outline. All my paintings look like this right away, I don't add eye details until later 

Then I add some color. Before I added that red it was all paynes grey, I just couldn't still with it! I should have taken one more picture between this one and the next.

Next I added her hair. Usually hair is after skin for me but I didn't want to overdue the red on her face. I add shadows and lips and struggle with white space.

Eye details, I added the freckles, adding all the black lines at this point. 

And adding white!it's simple but it takes so many layers of watercolor! Here I add all the colored pencil, shade extra with red and grey pencils, I look back at the picture to see if anything looks wonky, try to straighten things up. 

Aren't the freckles cute? 

It's been awhile! Art Journal Fun!

I have been neglecting my poor ole blog! Lots of things have happened. I moved, I opened an etsy shop! I stopped running the art group :/ I developed a sort of style, inspired by tons of artists and creative technique. I found my favorite supplies to use (watercolors, yummy) I still work every day on progressing my style and also my ability, practicing features and composition and pattern and detail. I still have so far to go! I've been enjoying destroying a small sketchbook with watercolor and pen and other fun stuff. It hates the watercolor, it doesn't absorb right, it kills the paper, but for some reason I really love it. Here are a few examples, I'm enjoying testing out new supplies and techniques in my journal, I should really invest in a nice watercolor art journal but ehh, I will just beat this one up for a while longer.
 


Anyway,  am thinking of doing some art challenges but I want to know where to find them! Let me know if you have any warm up art exercises, fun techniques to try, art challenges to partake in!