B.F.'s Daughter

I finished up the altered book journal that I have been working in.  These are the last pages.

I kept the title page so you could see this was called B.F.'s Daughter by John Marquand. I did another doodle over a wash of watercolor. I am really enjoying playing in this way.

This portrait was done on old book pages with pastels. The background is acrylic paint.

The borders on the page were paint chips cut up and then painted over. I like how they add dimension to the page.

This was started long ago, it is found art and by that I mean the woman was pulled from the background. At the time I figured she was giving birth to a baby or a new idea.

This self-portrait I did completely with white gel pen.  I used an old photograph of myself as the model. I was feeling particularly blue at the time so it seemed fitting.

This one is another self-portrait from an even older photo that I found lying around. I thought I would try a face in watercolor.

This is the last page in the book, so I can happily say that this journal is complete.  Ah now I can start a new one.

30 Day Portrait Challenge

My friend Violette is having a new challenge over at her blog. I saw the post and thought I should do that. A couple years ago Misty Mawn did a January journaling challenge and I really learned a lot by doing a portrait every day. I still dawdled until I saw my friend Janet doing it too.

So on Wednesday I painted this lady. She was painted on red rosin paper which is such a fun surface to paint on. Red rosin paper comes in huge roles and you can get it at Lowes. It is used in the roofing industry but is a great art paper too.

It was after this I saw Janets post about not understanding that this was a self portrait challenge not a portrait challenge and I realized I made the same mistake. Well being the rebels that we are we are just going to do portraits. People always tell me my painting look like me anyways. I can see where I made my mistake as the title of Violette's post is 30 Day Portrait Challenge. Sure she mentions that they are self portraits in the post but I skipped right over that little detail. Anyways I am going to attempt to do portraits all month.

Here is today's portrait, I must have painted her dress three or four times and it kept getting worse. I get impatient with acrylic paints sometimes and try to paint on top of colors that really need to dry first. At these times I just give up and add paper.

To join in the challenge just head over to Violette's blog, there is a flickr group to share your work