LB2016 : Fearless art

Next lesson for Life Book 2016 was a collaboration by Annie Hamman and her 3-year-old daughter on a portrait. Get a preview of the fun video they produced HERE. 
I couldn't convince my 11-year-old to collaborate with me, so just had to try being fearless alone. First fearless move, to use a double spread in my journal - working larger than I've worked before : this full spread measures 19" x 13 1/4" . And I'm not doing anything about covering the text because I think that will be cool in the background.

After my initial quick face sketch, I just dived in, with a playful attitude. Apart from following principles of where to place the main facial features, I tried to be free with random paint colours, and then with adding stencils, drippage, and further layers. Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's faces in her art journal have a 'fearless' quality which also inspired me to let go - check out this post for an example of what I mean. Without further commentary (hard for me to do that!) here are my progress photos

I had a degree of control with my stenciling in that I used permanent ink/paint in spray bottles. I adore the close-ups above and the eye at the top of the post. Shows you all the detail of the layers. This lesson was so much fun - I did let go and love her "messy" aspects. With a critical eye, I think maybe I should have left out the pen details in her hair, but I'm still happy with how she turned out : 

Click on the photo to see it larger, or go HERE to see my Flickr album of all my Life Book 2016 projects. You can see all my posts about Life Book this year HERE.