Face Drawing Progression

I'm working my way through Jane Davenport's 'Drawing and Painting Beautiful Faces' new book (published 2015). Jane is a former fashion illustrator, now artist and creates amazing, whimsical and beautifully-shaded faces! She is also a great and enthusiastic instructor!

I'm excited to be learning from Jane though I'm not at her skill level by any means. Her sentiments would be practice, practice, practice. So, I'm practicing today! She also prefers people work with a colored pencil rather than graphite so distraction is minimized (limits erasing and trying to achieve perfection right away).

These photos show a progressive drawing -- just finished -- having taken a risk to see what I could do. Some work is needed in blending the colors used for shading as well as blending the transition areas between shadow and light to minimize abruptness. It will also be helpful to look more closely at real faces to see their typical highlight and shadow areas -- so that those more realistic qualities --that create depth-- are brought into future drawings.

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Introducing 'Kaleidoclown'

For fun, I've drawn one of my own photos (yes, I was dressed in a clown outfit) and added a wild and crazy background to accompany it for today's practice effort. As part of sketching the piece, it was split into four sections with two opposing diagonal lines. In terms of color choices, I've worked with color gradations for some shape sections. Can you believe, there are five major shapes in this effort? There really are -- circles, squares, trapezoids, triangles and spirals. I think the substrate is Biengfang Watercolor Paper (140 lb.). The materials used were Ohuhu markers, Micron 01 pigment ink pen, some red Stickles glitter glue for the nose, and a white Posca pen (for white dots on the face and to highlight eyes) and a yellow one (for yellow dots in the center of the flowers on the hat). There was no intention in working on this piece other than to have fun...and based on how it looks, I'd say well done!. One thing I learned is that blending with the Ohuhus i

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

'The Creative Act', published just this year (2023), is filled with pearls of wisdom! I've done one read-through without marking up the book. But I will be re-reading it to digest it much more fully. With so much in the book, I sometimes felt like I was hearing familiar voices communicating similar thoughts. That includes art course instructors, Ardith Goodwin and Louise Fletcher; words spoken by Goenka-Ji when leading Vipassana meditation retreats; and books by others. Some of those authors include Brene Brown, John Cleese, Lynda Barry, David Bayles & Ted Orland, Cat Bennett, Austin Kleon, etc. Without a bibliography or reading recommendations list, I'm really curious about the breadth of reading done by the author. What/who were his favorite books/authors? How did he develop his insights into the creative process? The book is well-suited for marginalia. If you're wondering what that is, it is writing in the margins to restate what you've read,

New Project in Progress

I'm working on a new project with multiple layers and shapes of different colored organzas. It is an interpretation of lighting on an ice rink...from a show I recently saw. There is a lot more stitching to do, but I like how its coming along. I'm learning organzas are not easy to work with especially when you layer them and have overlaid edges. The fabric also tends to ravel easily. This post also linked to http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com .

Cay Denise

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