A Face a Day in May - No. 5

(Pen on paper)

A Face a Day in May - No. 4

(Ink and Prisma colored pencil)

A Face a Day in May - No. 3

(Pen and Prisma colored pencil)

A Face a Day in May - No. 2

(Pen and ink on paper)

A Face a Day In May - No. 1

I've been looking for some inspiration/motivation lately and this is what I came up with...A Face a Day In May.

I'll be drawing a face every day and posting them here. I'm working in a little spiral notebook that's around 5"x 7". I like the idea of working in a very non-intimidating, portable book. If I don't like one, I'll tear it out and start again.

Here's the first one:

(Pen and ink on paper)

Feel free to join me on your own "A (fill in whatever you'd like) a Day In May" drawing challenge! And remember to link back here so I can see them.

First Friday Art Class for April 2012 - We're So Fashion!

This month's class was all about FASHION!

We talked about the history of fashion illustration. We talked about how in fashion illustration everything is exaggerated--we want our drawings to be TALL and THIN. When doing a realistic drawing, you'd want your (adult) subject to be about 6 heads tall. In fashion, we went for 7-9 heads tall. If your subject is wearing a hat, make it dramatic. If you can add feathers or sparkle, DO IT! :)

We looked at lots of examples from three of my absolute favorite fashion illustrators: Kathryn Elyse, Julie Johnson and Brooke Hagel.

And then we used these wonderful tutorials from Brooke Hagel:
1. Poses - the concept of waistline and hipline and load bearing leg were hard to get at first but worth the effort because once you get an understanding of it, your drawing will improve immensely!
2. Faces - just by doing some simple measurement markers, you'll know exactly where to put the eyes, nose and mouth.
3. Lips - This is a great tutorial to get that model pout just right!
4. Hair - (we didn't get to this one, but it's good!)

Usually in class I work on a white board - this is what it looked like this week (notice our cartoon face from our October Class on the left side--notice he's crossed out. We don't want any chubby, funny faces on our fashion drawing) :

The girls did so well and were really engaged in drawing some lovely fashion illustrations. They did a great job!!

Their homework is to practice, practice, practice! And do some gorgeous original fashion designs.

First Friday Art Class for March 2012 - Color Craziness

This month our focus was COLOR, COLOR and more COLOR. We worked with watercolors in 3 different ways.

We began by making splatter creatures. You get a nice blog of juicy watercolor paints on your paper and then blow it around with a straw, like this:

You then let the splatters dry and then go back in with a thin permanent marker and add eyes to make splatter creatures. You can also add branches, words, anything!!

Once again the girls completely blew me away with their ideas and creativity. They each tried doing particular shapes and everyone's splatters were different (and wonderful!!).

We then moved onto rubber cement paintings. I splattered rubber cement on the paper hours before class. I would have liked the girls to be able to do it, but it wouldn't have been dry in time. Here they are drying in preparation for class:

The rubber cement acts as a mask for the watercolor. (There are more technical masking agents you can use with watercolor, but rubber cement is easy and cheap, so that's what we used).

The girls took their respective pages with the rubber cement dry and ready to go and they added color. However they wanted to. We talked about blending the colors into each other and letting them flow and stay a bit wet.

Here are their finished paintings--don't you love the gorgeous, bright, happy colors?? They will peel the rubber cement off once the painting is completely dry.

Here's one that's completely finished:

The last thing we worked on was painting a strawberry using first pencil, then thin permanent marker and then watercolor. They worked from life--having an actual strawberry to look at while they drew.

And here are their finished pieces:

Aren't they beautiful?

We had a lovely, color filled, (almost) Spring day! Looking forward to next month!!

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