LB2015 : Drawing on the inner and outer world

This next Life Book project was created by Jane Davenport. Her work is a-maz-ing...especially for someone like me who is newly experimenting with the world of faces - WOW.

Click HERE to go to Jane's blog

We started by making a collage of images that are meaningful to us - our inner world. I used New Zealand plants and a fantail, images from the beach, flowers, dictionary definition of "creation", sheet music and {of course} butterflies...then I looked at what I had and thought it looked a bit of a mess. I think my inner artist guardian must have been having a wee sleep ;-)

My thoughts were : it's not very cohesive - too many different things going on - I haven't gone with one colour scheme - I have no idea where to put a figure...Rather than give up immediately, I realised I might just need some more inspiration. So decided to have a flick through Jane's new book which arrived to live at my house yesterday! 

and I found this piece of a page - and a lightbulb went off...Very excited to try a stencil for my face

My friend has loaned me Jane's face stencils to try out, and when I found this page on Jane's site about using the stencils, I realised my collage base will work just fine...I just need to focus on some areas and let others go. First the face stencil - I applied black acrylic paint 

and once I'd drawn her figure with black permanent marker (and added a butterfly to her bustline), I added a green glaze to block in the background (Jane uses gesso for this step)

That background made it seem very obvious that she needed a lavender dress

turquoise hair

and I added a little acrylic paint to tone down the dark areas on her skin while being able to leave the soft florals on her arm and face untouched

Some black pen details and she is finished. You can click on the photo to see it larger.

I love that I've created something that is Jane Davenport's style, but also very me, and different from what other people created in this lesson. And I'm keen to try the other face stencils in my future play.
You can see all my posts about Life Book HERE and I've created a Flickr album for all my Life Book projects HERE