Her thoughts darted in and out like little fish

I usually paint my portrait pictures with a combination of guouche, water colour pencils/crayons and or using artists pencils. However, I enrolled in Portraits with Pam Carriker, which shows you how to paint and shade using acrylics. I find water colour so much more forgiving, but doing classes is all about stepping out of your comfort zone.

I decided to work on a spread in my Mole that I had previously added colour to (using up paint on my brush). At this stage I thought that I might like to draw a fairy, and experimented with swirly, curly wings.

Initial sketch

I try to incorportate as many experimental elements into each page. I decided to use an unusual colour pallette (well for me anyway). I wanted to use a bright green with the pink, and also incorporate orange.The first step was to overlay the page with green.

Green paint overlay

I have watched a video tutorial on adding alcohol to acrylic paints for a lovely effect and wanted to give it a try. Unfortunately I could not get it to work, so instead, gently rubbed over the green to reveal the pink beneath. I thought that perhaps the technique was not working because I was spraying my alcohol (100% Isopropyl alcohol) whereas it was "dripped" in the tutorial. Well I got a little carried away with my dripping....Lucky alcohol evaporates very quickly.

What happens when you pour instead of dripping.

I added a little more pink on the left hand side for balance

Colour Balancing.

Now I am ready to get down to the nitty gritty of the tutorial. I coloured her hair, and covered her neck and face with titan buff. I also added some burned umber to the edges of the pages. Note: RHS is not that dark. The page has curled from the moisture, and so threw a shadow when I photographed it.

Foundation colour added to face and hair

Using burned umber mixed with titan buff, I started to add the shading. I also coloured her shirt.At this stage, I also decided that I no longer wanted to do a fairy (incase you were wondering).

Adding shading

I continued adding more shading and added a print to her shirt. I also added her irises so that she no longer looks like zombie girl.

Final details added.

And finaly, I added my journaling. In the end, after much cursing, I actually liked the process and am going to practise painting with acrylics.

Calm in the Storm

My good friend Kelly was sharing  a visualisation with me, for those occasions when everything feels overwhelming. This has really helped me, and I wanted to immortalize it in my journal. Thanks Kelly.

 

This page has two techniques; the background using acrylics and a wax resist for the ship.

Part A: The background
With all my pages, I started by drawing the basic image that I wanted, in this case the waves.

1. Use a a mixture of Payne's Grey and Phthalo blue for the "stormy sky" 
2. Use Phthalo blue to paint the waves. 
3. Using Naples Yellow, and a filbert brush,  paint over the still wet Phthalo blue, to create the greener shades.
4. When paint is dry, dab on White on the crest of the waves.
5. Add lightening with a yellow and white pencil

 Part B: Wax Resist
I like this technique, because it incorporates some of the background colour into the image, which is particularly useful when adding collage elements. In this case I stamped an image, but this would work equally well for b/w collage images, or a black and white drawing.

Step 1: Stamp image onto paper (I used an old envelope)

Step 2: Outline key features with indelible ink (Copic Multiliner 0.03)

For the next two steps, you add colour and white with pencil. Because you are creating a wax resist, you need to use a soft pencil, such as Prismacolor.

Step 3: Colour in dark areas, and areas of shadow. Here I used French Grey 20% for shadow

Step 4: Colour sails with white

Step 5: Add a wash of background colour (mix colour with water.)

Step 6: Wipe off excess colour with a wet baby wipe. Trim and use in your journal.