Month: February 2015

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Radiant Faces Part 2 Lesson 6

Lesson 6 is Effy’s take on The Watcher.  Both Effy and Kylie did these as paint over collage using a self-portrait. I’m not a fan of painting over my own face.  As I watched the lesson videos, I liked Effy’s descriptions of what she was trying to convey with her page.  I was in an exploring space kind of mood, as in interstellar.  As I watched, I thought about my relationship to the ‘Verse. There have been many times in my life when I have closed my eyes and jumped, knowing that the Universe would point me home.

My plan for these pages was to represent my Watcher as the Universe, always looking out for me. I wanted my Watcher to be part of the ‘verse and tried to get Miss Universe to emerge from the black.

Or blue, in this case. Yeah, I know space is black, but I like blue. These pages were acrylics and Prisma pencils.

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Radiant Faces Part 2 Lesson 5

By the writing of this post, I finished Radiant Faces and it only took me an extra 3 months!  Both Radiant Faces and Mermaid Circus had multiple lessons every week, which is why it took me extra time.

Anywho, Part 2 Lesson 5 is Effy’s take on Julie Gibbon’s Inner Goddess. Effy’s take on this lesson involved 4 variations!  I tried all of Effy’s variations, but my favorites are these 2 gals.  Effy and Christy Tomlinson used black Stabilo All pencils. I liked the look of it in the videos and picked one up.  However, I didn’t care much for the look of the black Stabilo when it was activated with water. It looked dirty to me. But I liked the way the activated pencil looked like ink, so I bought the other colors available at Artist & Craftman: red, yellow, brown, blue and green.

For this lesson, I made these girls with the red and brown Stabilo Alls. I made 1 gal monochromatic and the other gal limited to black and red.  I really liked how these 2 gals turned out and really wanted to go back to Christy’s Girly Girl lesson using the brown Stabilo.  I decided to wait until I got through all the class lessons before revisiting the lessons I’d completed.

That took some willpower, let me tell you.

anne-thompson-part2_lesson5-brown anne-thompson-part2_lesson5

 

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Radiant Faces Part 2 Lesson 4

Effy’s take on Girly Girl.

At this stage of the class, I’m doing much more sketching before starting to work on each piece. Here are my sketches for Girly Girl. I like the idea of the water-activated Stabilo pencil, but the black is quite stark and can look dirty if you’re not careful. I was planning to just sketch, but then I felt compelled to continue working each page. So I did. I worked the same colors on both sides of the journal but in a different arrangement to see what would happen. Would they relate to each other? I also decided to make them look in the same direction, which I think ties them together.

https://flic.kr/p/px2x9p

One thing I tried this time was the way Effy (and Christy) apply the collage layer: very neatly in a vertical/horizontal arrangement. I’m a very random, higgedly-piggledy collage person. I love to just tear and glue pages all over the place. I felt this up and down method was a bit too rigid, but I tried it. Although it is rather difficult for me to stay within the lines, it does provide a kind of tension to the background, particularly when Effy added washi tape.

Here is my piece for Part 2’s Girly Girl. The up and down collage method sort of worked. Now that I’m taking more time at each stage, the landmarks of my faces are correct (or more so, anyway) even when I change the tilt of the face. She reminds me of my doll photos. I almost always tilt my dolls face, even when I shoot them looking into the camera. I feel this gives more life to their faces. I think it has to do with the shift of shadows – peoples faces are always moving and light dances across them all the time. Tilting the dolls head, even just slightly, changes the shadow play across their face.

But I digress. I was awake early Christmas Day, which is when I finished this page. By this time, I had spent a couple of evenings drawing a bunch of faces, in the styles I’ve learned over the past 18 months. I feel like I have a style, although I don’t want to become constricted by a single style. I can’t say I was completely successful with the black stabilo pencil on this one. I picked up a brown Stabilo that will start appearing in future pages. Overall, I love the way this version turned out, even though the black got a bit smudgy and dirty face looking.

Happy creating!

https://flic.kr/p/qwYviN

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Clever Coffee Packaging

Mr. Tenukihandcrafts joined a monthly coffee club run by a co-worker, Dollarcoffeeaday.  We like good coffee and this was a chance to try small batch blends you can’t pick up at the local supermarket.  We’ve enjoyed some mighty fine coffee but when we got the February batch today, we got a bonus. When Bill saw the packaging, he knew I would have to take a photo. I took this photo with my phone and edited it with Pixlromatic and Aviary.

The cards and envelopes are proper library supply and the labels were typed on a typewriter.

The coffees smell wonderful.

Can’t wait to check ’em out.

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