Tuesday, July 6, 2010

New Sketches

I'm in my second SuziBlu workshop, "Goddess & Poet" and working on sketches. The first I did looked terribly out of proportion to me though I thought I measured appropriately. More than just a Streisand nose, she had an elongated face. The next one, with the same proportions still seemed long to my husband, but Elvish to me. She is graphite layered with Prismacolor pencil and the photo above. So I tried again dividing the lower face into thirds not halves for the nose and got a much younger face. I've done this type of face on dolls many times so didn't wait to color her before moving on to the next face.
My fourth face compromised the measurements and seems to work though at the moment I feel her eyes are too far apart and the color looks too yellow in the scanned image but I didn't see it on the drawing. All of these are just preliminaries, to be layered with Golden translucent paints, and whatever other mixed media techniques Suzi throws at us. This goddess is in a jounal and we are to work on writing poetry as well... something I've not made time to do for years. I'm not into the whole "goddess thing" as far as religion goes, but Suzi explained it more on the level of celebrating all womanhood and the natural femininity we seemed to lose when fighting so hard to be equal to men who used to place us on pedestals and think of us as goddesses. Given my personal Rubenesque shape I think I could be a lovely goddess... LOL!
Suzi's classes are all done on video on her Ning network and though she gets a little off topic and wired sometimes it is really a good series of classes and fun. Goddess is teaching stylized faces though more advanced than the Petite Dolls class I took first. I hope to fit in Angles and Piety before September and ban my apprehension for the paint brush altogether. It's good to have a dream...

Friday, July 2, 2010

Finished Painting!

Lady Zen is now complete. She is not perfect, but then, neither am I! I used gold leafing for her collar and shaded it to show the texture. I added shadows to her costume, and dimensional crystals to her neckwear. I finally got the angle right so the metallic paints didn't confuse the camera lense and wash out or alter the color, alas you can't see the sparkle and shimmer as well. Refer back to the last sample of this work in progress and imagine merging the two backgrounds and you'll know what she really looks like. I'm working on mastering mixed media paintings not photography. For now, anyway. LOL!

Anywho, she was a blast to create and I will be offering her, or a sample very similar to her, as an on line workshop on Joggles, hopefully this fall.