Radiant Faces – The Goddess version 2

I took the time to work on my second version of The Goddess during this health camp time.

Like my first version of The Goddess, I used our wok as a template for the mandala. After drawing her, I started coloring her face using watercolor sticks and made a disaster out of it. So instead of starting over, I put on a brave face and tried putting on acrylic paint over her face and started over. This was the first time I did that and I was anxious. I left the acrylic paint to dry overnight before starting over. The next day, I started putting on watercolours again but this time reminding myself not to be in a hurry. If you know me, I get carried away by my own excitement and rush everything to finish. This time, as I am being mindful of everything I eat, feel and do. Taking time to be in the step by step process of my art is an awesome feeling. I get to look at every angle of the painting and make changes as I go through the process.

I love the make up I had given her using watercolor sticks and colored pencils. I used the same sticks on her hair, neck area and on the background.

I used the same colored pencil shade on her hair to stress on the outline and blended it using baby oil.

Bad me but I forgot the tangle name of the design I did for the mandala border. It was quite a tedious task as the painting was a bit big in diameter but I did not mind the repetitive activity as it helped relaxed my mind. With this border,  I used pigma micron pen 0.4.

The finished version two of The Goddess. I am glad that this project took one week to finish. Working on her a few hours during the day and managing the things I wanted to change made her more dear to me. I hope to develop the habit of walking away from a project and looking at it again with fresh eyes. I already did just that with this and hope to continue on with the succeeding projects. Another thing that made this project exciting was using watercolors over acrylic paint with the addition of colored pencils. This was the first face project that I did that bold move and I am happy and pleased with how things worked together.

Here is a close up look at her face. She looks kind of questioning and sad. I redrew her face three times and the result was always at this expression so I eventually respected the look she wants and worked with her and not against her.

Radiant: Faces – The Goddess version 1

Lesson four, The Goddess was conducted by Julie Gibbons. Julie talked about finding our inner goddess through meditation, connecting to one self and discovering our inner goddess. In her lesson, Julie showed us how to do a stylized face in a mandala form using letraset promarkers.

I do not have markers – aquamarkers or promarkers or copics  (yet), though we are encouraged to use what we have and not run to the nearest art store just for materials the teacher used. I opted to use four shades of coordinating acrylic paints, watercolor pencils, a black sharpie permanent marker and a black signo broad pen and our trusty wok used as my circle template in an A3 sized acrylic paper. I love how I am able to explore the materials I have and not be constrained by the lack of it.

After I traced our wok and its cover in my paper, I decided how would I like my face to be in the mandala. Will she be on the right side with hair flowing on the left or vice versa or will she be in the middle with hair flowing on both sides. I went for the front facing goddess in the middle of the mandala with a slight tilt.

This lesson reminded me of my paternal grandmother’s home with its glass tinted windows and wooden floors. I tried to mimic that effect with my goddess’ hair with watercolor pencils and I think my goddess is absolutely radiant.

Radiant: Faces – Girly Girl version 2

And so the inspiration from Christy Tomlinson‘s lesson at Radiant lingers. As I have mentioned in my first girly girl, Christy’s style of drawing faces is from the lips up and with this version, I tried my best to do just that. I really had a difficult time since I am very used to drawing faces starting from the eyes. I started doing this version with a couple more projects and eventually did not finish anything.

Then last Saturday night, I promised myself to finish her no matter what and no matter where she takes me. I started with shading her face which proved to be really really challenging but I persisted. I think I overdid the darker parts of her face with a lot of van dyke brown. Lesson learned and charged to experience. Maybe I’ll try to use a lighter shade of brown and build from there. Now for the fun part, I only put one coat of burnt sienna as hair color so that the design from the background will show through and her hair accessories where part of the set of flowers my sister gave which I altered using pastel crayons. I used twine that came with our pizza box take out and glued the altered flowers and added more from my happy mail stash (yep, prima flowers came in with happy mail) and added plastic blings I got from a store in Manila. To add interest to her paper dress, I cut out some of the flowers from the same paper, added some bling and adhered them using 3D dots adhesive. It does not show from the picture but the flowers are raised. She is now gracing my wall of fame.