The theme for this first month of Wanderlust 2021 is Reflections. For week three, we had a class with Kasia Avery, who encouraged us to make a self-portrait, either from a photo or by looking at our reflection in the mirror.
Kasia gave lots of tips on making portraits and showed how she sets up her palette with dark, medium and light tones, using heavy body acrylics this time. She started her portrait with collage, then after painting the portrait, she showed how to mix new colours from the same palette to add to the background along with some white here and there - I love how this brought everything together into a cohesive whole. Kasia finished her picture with a word of intention for this year.
Of course, although I started off in the same way, I ended up following my own path as usual. Here's how mine turned out ...
Somehow, my self-portrait morphed into my much younger self, probably because some of the stuff I was reflecting on goes waaaaaaaaaay back into my childhood. This is my weird, swotty, anxious, neurotic thirteen year old self I think!
Anyway - I started the same as Kasia, with some collage and a sketch, then set up my palette and enjoyed trying out heavy body acrylics for the first time to paint the face and add colour to the background. Then I couldn't resist going back in with black and white pastel pencils to add detail and definition ... then more collage ... some scribbled writing ... brighter colours ... and finally I broke out the Posca acrylic paint pens to add my words and couldn't stop doodling.
I'm beginning to realise that whatever lesson I'm doing, I will learn from it, try something new, practice different techniques, but probably end up going off on a tangent, so that it doesn't turn out how it was "meant" to be - but that doesn't matter as long as I have a go and enjoy the process, and hopefully it's part of developing my own style :o)
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