Self portrait...

OK well...sort of. lol

This was just a little more practice drawing. I was sitting where there wasn't anything interesting around me to draw so I started drawing my left thumb. Then I thought I'd draw my right finger and thumb turning the page of the book.

Just a little bit of cool looking silliness. And as close to a self portrait I'll ever get.

Next...

Acrylic paints: Light turquoise, Medium turquoise, dark turquoise, dark turquoise shimmer paint

Acrylic gesso, white

screening(small piece), sequin waste

baby wipes

Liquitex matte varnish

Here's the Roman page from yesterday. I started by varnishing the pencil sketch so it wouldn't smear. That dried fairly quickly.

I gessoed the facing page and then painted it. I did a swoosh of very light turquoise over the gesso. Then I used a baby wipe to smear it a bit. Then I did a swoosh of medium turquoise and smeared that with the same baby wipe. Then I swooshed (technical, eh?) the yellow and baby wiped that with the same wipe. Then a few blotches of the darkest turquoise and baby wiped that. The baby wipe is fairly saturated with different paint colors at this point and is still wet. I smeared the residual paint onto the sealed pencil sketch. It looks kind of like sky now. Cool.

Now back to the painted page.

I took some screening and some sequin waste to use as stencils.

I took the screening first, blotted some dark shimmery turquoise on it and then applied the wet screening onto spots on the page. I did this a few times. Then I wiped off the screen and did the same thing with the gesso.

Then I did a couple of spots the same way with the sequin waste and the gesso.

I finished it off with some Liquitex matte varnish. I'm trying to see what will work the best to keep the pages from sticking together.

I also discovered something else really nice. If you do the gesso and the paint layers first, THEN glue your pages together the page doesn't hardly wrinkle at all. It's nice and flat and straight.

I think this book is going to turn out to be one of my best.

Monday sketching....

Well, I did these yesterday but I was too tired last night to post them so here they are today.

I was at the library yesterday waiting for DD's class to finish and decided to do some drawings from a book. I picked a book on medieval architecture and did the arch on the right.

I did the Roman building on the left from a teeny, tiny photo from a magazine article that was talking about concrete mixes that date back to ancient Rome.

So I guess I did alright for not having picked up my pencils for quite a long time. I still have it in me. Nice to know.