I’m linking up with Art Every Day Month and Paint Party Friday.   I haven’t had a great deal of success with faces so I tend not to draw or paint them.  I’m tired of being afraid of faces.  The only way to get over it is to paint and draw faces.  I have learned a lot already with this face.  Like the pupils should not be looking straight ahead.  The eyes and lips are coming along acceptably.  No where near finished, but I feel I am on a decent path.  The nose?  What nose you say.  Well, I painted over the first several noses simply because they looked like the NOSE OF A MUPPET!  I am not being self deprecating – it really did look like that.  The nose is the feature that is giving me the most trouble.  I had to step away from it.  Any hints on how to draw a human nose?

Art Every Day Month Day 9!  I had an 18″x24″ canvas to paint.  I grabbed one of my favorite brushes – but really it would take me all day to paint it with that little thing, especially since this was just a background layer.  My impatience led my hands to start smearing paint around – what joy.  The paint smeared, I smushed it into the canvas letting the texture show, and I was happy.  The kind of happy that goes all the way through your soul happy.  I need to finger paint more often!  There was leftover paint from working on the canvas and I had to put that paint somewhere….I decided to try using a stencil with paint and my hands.  Really liked the result.

Notice all that extra paint!  The stencil is just sitting on top of my art journal page.

I used blue and yellow but mixed it on the actual stencil using my hands.

Now I have a background for a future journal page and my leftover paint is not leftover any more.

Another stencil I used.  It felt so good to finger paint into stencils that I actually squirted out more paint!  Once my hands were all painty it seemed a shame to stop – so I didn’t!