Number 34 of 52: Found

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Last weekend Galia Alena hosted a Creative Weekend Retreat. There were a lot of classes over 48 hours. One of the ones I watched was Mystele Kirkeeng who showed us how she did muck paintings, paintings that she created out of the wipings of left over paint.

As it happened, I had a page started and then I took it to the nth degree:


I brought it back a little bit and that's when I found the jawline of the face. I sketched her in with white charcoal.


Mystele used chalk pastels as a beginning to laying in the face before she went on to use other media. I did a round of pastels:


But nothing was really gripping the paper, so I carefully painted the face with clear gesso and then reapplied the pastels.


That's how she looked before I sprayed her with workable fixative, and then more of the background came through. I needed to fix her nose and add highlights so I finished her with a bit of paint pen and brush marker.


Another of the creative retreat teachers (alas I didn't write her name down) taught about contour drawing. This is the blind (where you don't look at the page) contour drawing I did. Did I peek? OK, maybe a couple of times. Please note that she has a number of eyes on one side. This was fun, but I'm not going to count her as one of my 52 portraits. (Could you tell it was a her?)


What's next? Well there was Emma Petitt, who taught a huge portrait and I can't decide whether I should scale it down to fit into my book or go big... stay tuned!

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