Work in Progress Wednesday

I've still got several thing in the works, including my painting for DEEP which I should update on as we're now halfway through week 5 and there's only week 6 left to go! But for today, I'll keep it simple so I can paint and enjoy the first day of Spring.

Still working on The Lady. We're near 60 hours now and I'm adding snakes. SNAKES! This is a true testament of my ability to listen to my intuition and the painting for direction because, if I'm being totally honest, I don't like snakes. At all. Not even a little bit. And I've never painted them before because, *shivers* Well, I'm painting them now. And I'm not painting just any old friendly snake, like a garter or rat snake, nooo. I didn't know what kind of snake it was going to be when I started them, I just knew they had to be a grey/brown and looked through dozens of pages of images before I found the right snake. Black mamba. Oh boy.


Sketched and inked a new watercolor outline. Going to give this new style of mine a go in a different medium and see what happens. I'm sure it will be drastically different than the acrylic ones I do just by the nature of the mediums. But, it will be an adventure!

What are you all working on this week?

29 Faces - Wrapping Up

The challenge ended at the end of February, but I haven't had the time (or patience) to fight with my scanner until today. I swear sometimes that device is possessed by a spiteful goblin.

I know I had some requests, especially after posting the lovably skittish Rincewind, but I did a lot of these in little pockets of spare time so they're mostly off the top of my head. Granny Weatherwax's dour face will have to wait a while longer. ;-) So, without further ado, here are my final 11 faces:

These two (and a half but who's counting?) are part of the painting I'm working on for DEEP with Dirty Footprints Studio. They're done in acrylic and may change as I continue to work further on the painting.


This little lady is also part of my larger painting for DEEP.


Just a quick sketch of a Victorian lady from a photo. Not much to say here as she isn't fleshed out very well.


This one is a pencil drawing of actor Zachary Levi. It's not quite finished and is one of the very, very few portraits I've ever attempted. (Seriously, I think this is the 3rd one. Ever.) It looks enough like him for me to be ok with, but looking at this and the reference photo I can easily pick out several mistakes in the proportions. It was great practice though, so I'll take it!


Another quick pencil sketch. I had masks, particularly bunny masks, on my mind for some reason.


A quick oil pastel sketch. Playing with colors in skin tone.


I picked up some bright colored ball point pens to use in my Moleskine! I was getting a little tired of just black and blue. So this one, which is less of a face and more of a body, really, was my first experimentation with color.


And the color exploration just kept going from there... (This one I call The Shamaness.)


To here. Which I love. I'm not sure how much black work I'll be doing for a while, because I'm thoroughly, hopelessly addicted to color right now.


I imagine that emo kids would hate sprinkles. Especially rainbow ones. So that's what I went with for my last face, courtesy of a rainbow sprinkled doughnut. ;)

And that wraps up 29 faces! Hope you enjoyed all of them and thanks for checking them out. :)

Faces 10 -18

What was that I said in my last post about not wanting to share more than 5 or 6 faces at a time? Ah well, let's just chuck that notion straight out the window because I'd like to share what I've done up to this point so I don't get even more behind with the challenge.

This time, I worked less in my moleskine and more in my mixed media book and used a few different techniques, styles and mediums. Also, I'm pleased to say I've worked on quite a few male faces this week too! Some of them even look less like ladies - it's the little accomplishments, really.

I've really enjoyed playing around with all these different personalities and faces and hope you enjoy them:

This guy is just a quick anatomical sketch in the Moleskine. Just your run of the mill cheap-o ballpoint pen - aka, my favorite thing to use in my Moleskine. ;-) I'm trying to get more familiar and comfortable with the musculature of the human body so I can use it to help the figures in my paintings to flow a bit more naturally.


This is my interpretation of Rincewind from the magical land of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Rincewind is my favorite Wizzard and one of my favorite people riding around on Great A'tuin's back! He's cringing at the inevitable horrible thing that is lurking just around the corner as he prepares to use his super skills of running away once again! I decided to make his eyes my own interpretation of the color of magic: Octarine - a sort of greenish, purple, orangish color.


Just a little two color painting of some lovers. I suppose Valentine's Day went to my head a bit. These two were done up in watered down acrylics.


Went for quick and vibrant here. I think I succeeded!


A little Zetti-Inspired lady sketched in pencils and inked with markers. Markers are by far my least favorite medium. Ick.


A profile of a young man - he came from my head, not true life and I didn't use any references for him. I'm pretty pleased with his jaw line and the fact that I didn't make him more manly with a beard - my typical go-to cop-out response to attempting to draw more masculine men. He's done in mechanical pencil.


Everyone's favorite Gorgon, Medusa! This one was originally going to be just a quick sketch with a few touches of shading here and there. As you can see, she had other plans for me and soaked up a lot more time than I had originally anticipated. She too, was done entirely with a mechanical pencil.


I'm counting this grouping as two faces, per the different colored splatter on them. Not really sure where that came from, but as I doodled the faces on to the page, I felt they needed it. These folks were done with colored pencils.

Letting Your Hand Wander

During my time in school, sitting in art classes and working on projects, it was a very serious affair. Art was always approached with an intended goal in mind before you'd even laid down your first mark on the fresh paper. Sure, you might sketch a few ideas out on newsprint to figure out spacial proportion, composition, maybe even scratch some color in to form a road map from blank page to masterpiece.

But doodling? Nope. No doodling. We drew from our minds as well as from life in front of us, but we always knew "what" we wanted to draw while we worked. If the budding young artist sitting beside me asked 'Hey Danni, what are you drawing?" I'd respond with something like "An apple tree at sunset, with a girl sitting beneath it reading a book" or "That vase filled with brushes, as a study of light and shadow on glass as well as transparencies." All very specific and structured.

And you know what? I was perfectly fine with that. I still do that with some of my work; sitting down with a clear idea of what I'd like to create and why and working on it until I'm happy with it. It's easy for me, laying down sketches and color and getting from point a to point b. That's how I've always worked, it's how my mind and my hands have been taught to communicate.

When I took Big with Dirty Footprints Studio last year, it was an incredible challenge for me to let that go. To approach the blank page and let loose - to scribble and add color and let my mind and my hand wander. To let my intuition guide me rather than my head. My inner critic had a field day with it; she and my intuition have some trust issues.

It was like doodling on a grandiose scale and I didn't doodle. Had never done so and in fact was positive that I couldn't do so because when presented with a sketch book or other small portable pad of drawing paper, it would collect dust. When I had attempted zentangles and mandalas they weren't what I'd call zen or relaxing at all! The desire to make them look awesome, to make them just so and my inability to let go of creative control made them abject failures for me.

But, while I was taking this class I forced myself to step outside of my artistic comfort zone and take a leap of faith. I surrendered myself to the process of painting fearless and wonderful, powerful things started tumbling from my head. All manner of shapes, symbols, colors and people poured on to my paintings, memories I had tucked away to forget about. It was healing. It was cathartic. Most of all though, letting my hand wander without my emotions getting in the way was freeing.

And now I doodle and sketch constantly. On scraps of paper, envelope backs and most recently in the little hardbound Hobbit Moleskine my best friend gifted to me over the holidays. He said it was for, "you know, ideas or maybe sketches. Whatever you want to put in there." And it sat untouched as I pondered how to start it off perfectly.

After a week of it collecting dust, I stuck it in my purse and carried it around with me for a bit. During a break at the day job I pulled it out, having forgotten the book I was reading at home, thumbed through it picked a page at random and started to sketch. Who says you have to start at the beginning anyway? And now that Moleskine and I are inseparable.

And it even has my first mandalas in it. They aren't "perfect" but they're exactly what I needed.