LB2015 : Inner Artist Guardian

The next Life Book project on the schedule was with Jane Davenport but Tam also provided us with a bonus lesson from LB2014 for those who wanted to have some extra practise for a front facing portrait. With a mixture of excitement and nervousness (which is what I currently feel every time I create a face) here's what happened

 Initially very happy with my pencil drawing on watercolour paper.

And quite like how her face looks with the colour and highlights added. Then I started painting in the rest of it. Don't know about you, but my work always goes through an ugly stage at some point in the process I know I just have to push through. 

Click on the photo so you can better see what I wasn't happy about. We had some collage elements in our background.  I don't like how that looks on her dress - looks like Cinderella patches at this point! And in the background, some of the paper lifted - I think I applied the gesso when a paint layer was too wet. I was happy to peel some of it off. After I let it all dry, I added more layers. 

Because I had chosen orange as one of my colours for this piece, I was really happy that I'd used the burnt sienna paint in my last post because I knew it would work well as the base for her hair. 

I lightened her dress with white pen work around the neckline and butterfly, and added rayon thread machine stitched details. 

The wing details were created with metallic pen work

And of course I had to add my word for 2015. I like the soft quality of the stabilo marks all pencil here.

I had thought she was done, but leaving the room and then coming in for a fresh look made me realise I needed to add a stitched border to the background edge

This is my completed inner artist guardian - click on the photo to see her larger 

She will make sure my inner critic doesn't stop me creating. Tam has also created a blogpost about how to deal with your inner critic if you don't have an artist guardian :-)
You can see all my posts about Life Book HERE and I've created a Flickr album for all my Life Book projects HERE