29 Faces Challenge: Face # 10

Face # 10, the background is a bit muddy.  I'm always too impatient to let the layers dry appropriately, and on this thin paper, I didn't quite come away with what I had in mind.  Busy day, so this will have to do.  The fact that I got her done is a good thing in itself!

I used a whole mess of art supplies on this one.  Stamps, inks, white gel pen, bingo dauber (black), prismacolor pencils, pitt artist pens, watercolor crayons and twinkling H20 watercolors, black micron pen and last but not least, acrylic paints.

Portrait Tutorials: Full Face, Portrait View and 3/4 View

I was delighted to find these tutorials shared by artist Joyce van der Lely. She is a wonderfully talented mixed media artist and if you click on her name above it will take you to her blog.

When I first started drawing faces I searched high and low for a good tutorial that wasn't too complicated for a beginner like myself.  I couldn't find anything, other than online classes that you had to pay for, and believe me, I spent HOURS looking for good tutorials with no luck!

I hope Joyce's videos will help those of you who want to learn how to draw a face.  I know I would have loved to have found these 3 years ago!








Don't be afraid to try drawing faces...they are so much fun, and not as hard as you think!  Start from the full face view and move on from there.  There are many fun classes online that you can take as well.  Monica Zuniga of Hands and Heart offers many great workshops.  Two of my favorites are Mixed Media Faces, and Pencil Drawing.  She goes into all the detail of how to construct the face proportionally, how to draw each facial feature in different views, shading, and using mixed media to create stylized faces.  Suzi Blu, Pam Carriker and Tam Laporte (Willowing) all offer great classes!  And  Art Trader Magazine website (a new website I just discovered today), offers numerous fun workshops on all different styles of whimsical faces!

I'm challenging myself to draw 100 Faces of all different views and orientations.  It will be really cool to be able to look at 100 drawings and see my progress! I'm also going to be experimenting with different art supplies for my faces.  Some will be graphite, some charcoal, some watercolor, some mixed media, some collage....etcetera.  I'm really looking forward to getting better at stylized portraits (portraits drawn from the imagination), as that has been a huge obsession for the last 3 years!  I can't wait to share all 100 of them when I'm finished!

Hope you enjoyed this post!  And a huge Thank you to Joyce for sharing her talent with us!

Spare Time Sketching

I've been working so hard on getting my various Art Play Today pages up and running (Facebook and Web Page) and everything that goes along with them like organizing and formatting images! I haven't had a whole bunch of time left over to actually make or finish any art.  So when I finally get the kids to bed and have a chance to sit down and chill, I take out my sketch book and just draw for the fun of it.  Here are a few of my recent sketches...

Broken Heart

I love drawing faces! But I never know what to call each one.

I finally decided to try and draw the whole figure (so what if it's not proportional right?)