Cay Denise

What fun to get together with a lovely, small creative group of special women friends!  It is usually a quarterly meet-up at one of our homes that includes some light munchies followed by a creative activity.  That day was today! We had some wonderful food (asparagus soup, watermelon cake, and crackers and baba ghanoush).  Thanks go to our wonderful hostess, Karen, for the lovely meal as well as thinking up the special creative activity! After lunch, we went on to make dreamcatchers.  I recently did a painted, multi-media dreamcatcher, but today's was a bit different.  We started with a ring that was wound with fiber and then used a needle and silk thread with intermittent beads to create the spider web effect in its center.  Once done, that was decorated with feathers and beads, etc. What a neat project to do as a gift -- and include a bit about the history of dreamcatchers!

I'm purposefully trying to do these face sketches quickly.  This one took about 15-20 minutes. In looking at it, the proportions are coming along.  Eyes are looking more like a pair versus different in size.  The shading around the eyes and nose is improving.  It is SO MUCH better overall than most of those I've done since starting to draw faces--after a project led by Jane Davenport as part of the Life Book 2015 experience!

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

Using a collage base -- one of my digital face creations has been added and painted plus lots of other touches (like gesso-ing over parts of the collage).  My base collage ended up being very colorful rather than the two-color plan I originally had.  In this project, I used Liquitex Matte Medium, based on the instructor's suggestion, and liked it because the collage finish was more smooth than others I've worked with recently. This piece was created through a class offered by Tamara Laporte from Willing Arts Ltd. For more information, visit this link:  www.willowing.org .

As a project to represent my community, I chose a mountain scene.  Can you tell? This was a tough project and lesson for me - finished today.  Shading and highlights are not something I necessarily think about or plan for in advance of doing a project (also true of my 'seeing' photographs).  So, choosing what I was going to shade and highlight on this project were challenging choices. as you can see.  The blending needs some improvement, even though I like the three-dimensionality of the abstracted tree trunk.  What I primarily learned is that the collage base needs to be lighter weight.  Mine wasn't as I'd used thick papers and that became a problem especially when applying gesso to reduce the intensity of the collage colors.  My brayer couldn't make contact with all the layers of the paper that should have been covered with it. In any case, I keep learning!   This piece was created through a class offered by Tamara Laporte from Willing Arts Ltd. For more

My dreamcatcher on a collage canvas background.  It turned out pretty well! This piece was created through a class offered by Tamara Laporte from Willing Arts Ltd. For more information, visit this link:  www.willowing.org .