Keep swimming

Another head in the water, this time not floating, but just upright with a bright swim cap on.

I started with a layer of Amsterdam Turquoise Blue acrylic paint with some Titanium white added so it would be more blotchy and a bit of a gradient going from darker on the underside of the page to lighter on the top.  On top of this first layer I stencilled some Brilliant Blue and white 

The face and flowers were drawing on Color Copy 120gsm paper and colored with copics. I added some details with my polychromos colored pencils and down with Decopatch glue. 

As most of the time I finished the border of the page with blended Distress ink. 

Cracked

 

I've had this idea of a face though a broken window for a while, but wasn't sure it would work out. Luckily the Large Dylusion Creative Journal has a nice binding so I could cut out a big center part of a centerfold of a signature. 

But lets start at the beginning.

First I drew a face and colored it with my polychromos pencils by Faber-Castell on a separate piece of paper. I really tried to take my time and not rush it. And I'm pretty pleased with the results, although I think I should push the shading a bit more. (something to keep in mind for next time, and maybe practice on a smaller face.) I blended the hair with some oil and a blending brush to bring out the orange a bit more. 

For the pages in the journal I started out by finding the middle page a signature.  This is the page where I would be cutting out a big hole and covered this page with black Gesso by Amsterdam. 

Since I had colored the hair orange I decided to us a complementary color and made the background for the face light purple with Amsterday Acrylic paints. When this was dry I covered the page in Violet Perlacryl by LascauxI then quickly laid down a stencil from American Crafts and whipped away the paint through the stencil leaving the stencil image in darker purple. The Peracryl is really fast drying so some parts didn't remove as well and were too dark. To lighten it I used some white acrylic paint on a roller.  

I also stamped a diamond pattern in silver with Encore ink. (This ink WIL NOT DRY. I've had it on a card a couple of years ago and it never really dried, so I used some clear embossing powder to set it. ) The stamp I used is "French Market" by Tim Holtz.

The other sides of this page I covered with streaky Studio Bronze by Lascaux, mixed with some white and water to make it streaky. I also got some purple mixed in to it. That's because I used a mixing plate that had some dried purple on it. When I scraped of the last bits of the bronze mixture some purple came with giving it some color touches.  

To finish of the background pages I blended some black soot distress ink around the edges. 

With all the background pages done I cut out the broken glass/mirror pattern. I made sure to keep the binding string intact and positioned the hole so that the center page was still secured with the outer stitches. 

I used Decopatch glue to glue down the cut out of the face and I shaded around the image with a dark grey Faber-Castell Pitt brush pen.

At first the idea was to glue down the black page to the purple background, but I'm glad I decided to leave it as is so I can flip it back and forth. 

The finishing touch was drawing some silver lines as cracks in the glass. And now it's done I'm not sur eit's a window, might be a mirror :)

Gigi the Grey Girl

 

I know ...it's been a while! 

I did make things in the meanwhile, I just didn't blog about it.  (Maybe I'll write some blogs about it later.)

For now I'll talk a bit about this greyscale Girl, Gigi, I recently made

I had a nice blotchy background and I thought a simple grey scale girly face would be nice on it. 

The background is made with my Amsterdam acrylic paints just scraped on with a credit card. In the middle I used some matching washi-tape because some colors from the surrounding pages seeped through. 

I drew the girl on a separate piece of paper, colored her in with toner grey Copics and cut her out. 

I also drew some grey lines on white Tissue paper and tore strips from it for the edges. I glues everything down with decopatch glue.  To give it some depth I outlined the image with a dark grey Faber Castell Pitt pen end blended it out a bit with a wet wipe.