LB2015 : Painting the Muse

This next Life Book project was created by Alena Hennessy. Last month I shared how much I'd enjoyed her bonus lesson "Be here now" - quick paintings. These were my paintings after spending 15-20 minutes.

Really fun and freeing so this was the natural next lesson choice for me. The topic was goddesses - here's one of hers (not the goddess that was demonstrated) 

I especially love how she uses caran d'ache neocolors and gel pens to add details and make marks. I decided not to think about a specific goddess, but to think about goddess qualities while I created my piece : abundance, nature, strength, kindness, peace (especially with the horror of the Paris attacks all over the news), wisdom.
And I did a little bit of research about what colours symbolize :
Yellow/orange : energy, optimism, health, happiness
Gold : prosperity, abundance, success. compassion, wisdom, love
Purple : magic, spirituality, creativity, dignity, royalty 
Started with an inky background dripping down the page in my main colours.

Happily these formed a good face shape. Unhappily I rushed it and her eyes were too close together and not looking right. I could have just painted over and not shared, but I want to encourage beginners (I only started faces at the beginning of this year) not to give up on your work, but to try again. Layers and a bit of thought make your work better.

Thankfully, nothing is unsalvageable and I laid down a heavy layer of white acrylic paint so I had another chance - she already looks better!

I covered all her face in a coat of pink because that yellow wasn't working for me either, and then went back to basics with face proportions

and with a flower stamp to start her crown of flowers, I can see she is heading in the right direction now

Really happy as I kept working on her face

then more layers to her hair and it was time to add pen work in various places - lots of fun - I used a white sharpie paint pen and a gold sakura gelly roll metallic for the most part

The flowers needed more definition towards the end so I overstamped again using my lovely gold stamp pad

And in the end my goddess looks nothing like Alena's examples and totally like mine. This is a good thing, but I really would like to do this again with more opportunity for patterning in the background.

Click on the photo to see it larger or see it in the Flickr album for all my Life Book projects HERE. You can see all my posts about Life Book HERE.