ArtyFartyAnnie

 I'm very much enjoying Paint Your Heart & Soul again this year, though I've fallen a bit behind at the moment. Week 16 with Emma Petitt was such an inspiration - I love her use of colour and the techniques she showed us and I particularly enjoyed the way she encouraged us to paint the hands HUGE instead of shying away from them. Although I copied Emma's composition completely, which I don't normally like to do, I still learned a lot and was very happy with my finished painting. The whole process felt very relaxed and liberating from beginning to end. We started with a very bold and colourful underpainting, then went on to a charcoal sketch, then applied acrylic paints with large brushes in a very loose style, allowing parts of the underpainting to show through. I think I still need to work on the faces a bit, but I didn't want to get too fussy, so I may come back to that later. 

Whenever I have an hour or so to play in my room just lately, I've been working on another page in "This is Not a Book" by Keri Smith, who also wrote Wreck This Journal, which I really enjoyed - see a flick-through of my finished WTJ here .  This new book is a bit different, and I'm finding it more of a challenge, but it's a lot of fun and I'm making up my own rules as I go along. Each page has a prompt, such as "This is an Impermanent Object" or "This is a Thought Garden". Here's the page I completed yesterday, This is a Challenge ... It's very liberating to work in these books - because they're just a bit of fun, the paper is rubbish, it's not meant to be a work of art, there's no pressure, it's just playtime and it's quick. There's a playlist on my YouTube channel called This is Not a Book where I'll be putting all my process videos as I work through this book - check it out and maybe you'll want ...

 Hello Fellow Deskers and Bloggy Friends, It's been an age - other stuff getting in the way so I haven't had time to properly join in with WOYWW for weeks and I miss my weekly snout around other people's crafty spaces. Here's mine, where I have the contents of my latest Scrawlr Box hoping to get time to play later today. Number One Son has just left ten minutes ago, having stayed with us for a fortnight after coming back to the UK from Portugal. It had been over two years since I'd last seen him this time and don't know when I'll see him again, so I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself this morning. On the bright side, how lovely to see some sunshine, isn't it? I spent the day yesterday planting up my pots in the back garden, listening to the birds and bees being busy.  Number Two Son and I have been making a puppet and streaming the process on Twitch TV. Here he is, almost finished, he's actually a caricature of said son and does look very like him...

 For today's portrait for the 30-day challenge (currently more likely to be a 90-day challenge!), I was working from a photograph of Marlene Deitrich. It was one of those moody, dramatically-lit, black-and-white movie-star shots, and I wanted to try and reflect that brooding, femme fatale quality that she was famous for. I was frustrated that I couldn't get the likeness and didn't really have time to tinker with it any more, but it was fun trying out a different style and using just markers and one 7HB pencil. 

 Waaaaaaaaayyyy behind in my 30-day challenge now, but still enjoying working on the beautiful and interesting faces of these 30 inspiring women, from photo references originally pulled together by Olga Furman for her Ode to Women challenge.  This time I had a go at Diana Ross, just a quick charcoal sketch on cold-pressed paper ... I found this angle quite difficult to do - she's holding her head at a slight angle and tilted slightly back - but it's all really good practice and I enjoyed trying! I also enjoyed experimenting with three different types of charcoal - willow sticks, compressed charcoal and charcoal pencil - they were all useful for different stages of the work. Blending stumps, kneaded eraser and my fingers were also very handy for creating shadows and highlights.  In the reference photo, Diana's expression was really interesting - to me, she seemed thoughtful, a bit wary, almost challenging - I think my version has a very different expression, but I'm stil...

Falling way behind with my thirty-day challenge now - I've had more pressing things to do over the last couple of weeks, so I've been missing my online art classes as well, but I'll enjoy catching up when I have more time.  Anyway, we're on to inspiring women singers now and the first one I tried was Aretha Franklin ... I just did a quick charcoal sketch of a piece of watercolour paper which already had some brushed off some paint from a previous project, so you can see the pink and orange coming through, which I like. Then I used pastel pencils in black and white to add darker tones and highlights, with a tiny bit of pink for her lips. Next legend on my list is Diana Ross. Not surprisingly, I now have a soundtrack of some of my all-time favourite music running through my head :o)

My fifth portrait for this week of the 30-day challenge originally set by Olga Furman. Still being inspired by women nurses, this last one brings us right up to date. I can't find a name or any other information for this nurse, but she's clearly wearing full PPE and looks like she's working through another gruelling shift caring for her patients in the fight against COVID-19 ... This was a very mixed-media piece - I started with acrylic paint which I applied using a Gelli plate technique (inspired by last week's Wanderlust class with Kasia Avery), then went back and forth with pastels, black and white charcoal, coloured pencils and more paint, until I decided it was done.  Of course we're all especially aware at the moment of the dedication and heroism of nurses working so hard to care for their patients in difficult circumstances all over the world. Spending this time studying the photographs of these five women spanning three centuries has really made me think abo...