Portrait Studies

One of my goals is to learn how to draw faces and portraits. It's a challenge to get proportions correct and placement of facial features. Ever since I took a two day workshop from Anne Bagby in 2004, I've collected photos of faces and practice drawing them occasionally.
When we sketch at coffee houses in the winter, I bring my little box of faces and practice drawing them. To see how my drawing compares to the original photo, I scan each into Photo Shop and over lay them to scale. The drawing is on the bottom and the photo on top with an opacity of 50%.
Now I can observe both layers to see how they relate to one another.
This tells me I have to work on the placement and spacing of the eyes and mouths. With practice, these drawing will become more accurate.

Photo Shop Online Course with DJ Pettitt

DJ Pettitt offers an online course using Photo Shop. I've wanted to update my skills and learn to use more techniques and program features. The program contains so many tools that I feel like I'm just skimming the tip of the iceberg. Here are the layers as I ordered them bottom to top. Each layer has an adjustment layer and/or filter.

Layer 1- crumpled paper-

Layer 2- view from Anne Amie Vineyard-
Layer 3- peony photo from The Peony Place

Layer 4- close-up peony photo-

End result with all layers and adjustments-

Mt Hood Landscape for Nature Gathered Challenge

I used Alma Cox's telamadera fusion technique to make this piece. She was a featured artist on Oregon Art Beat in February. Her work inspired me to do a piece on wood with burnt-in lines of my sketch, acyclic paint and fused fabric. In Spanish, tela is fabric and madera is wood. She also wrote an article about her process in Cloth Paper Scissors March/April 2008. I see she is teaching at Art & Soul in Portland this year. I left the mountain and sky painted without fabric and burnt into the wood the fir trees. It's a fun process.
I wanted to play with color and value studies using Photo Shop. It's hard to distinguish differences from this scan but it did help me see what colors to lighten or darken.
This is my final study before I put finishing touches on the piece.

Back from ArtFest

The ArtFest theme this year was Forest Walk. I made this PhotoShop collage for my journal before the event using photos taken the end of January at Play along with the
handmade little creature in the middle that someone gave to each of us.

Anahata's Mixed Media Mandala workshop inpired me to have fun with gold foil, paint and doodling.

I collected a variety of plant leaves from Marianne's garden on Vashon and used them for gelatin prints in Dorit Elisha's workshop Nature Imprinted. At the end of the day, we made collages with our prints.
Theo Ellsworth's workshop Mystery Play Inside inspired imaginative drawing- what he calls imaginary performance art. He led us through several exercises to deal with the inner critique. The drawing below represents my secret language drawn with eyes closed and translated later with eyes open using my imaginary detective.
This drawing uses the awkward hand to explore the inner-child out on the playground. His way of delving into and exploring our imaginary world offers a deep well of creative inspiriation.ArtFest offers the chance to see old friends, make new friends, learn new techniques, feel the creative energy and the bounty of imagination in all the inspired projects from each workshop. It's creative adrenaline for my art.

Happy Valentine's Day