It's time to Show Your Face again!

Welcome to Magpieheaven! I am really enjoying Kim Dellow's invitation over at her Art it Friday blog to 'Show Your Face'. Each week Kim gives us the chance to link up the faces we have been sketching here. This is such a great opportunity to practise drawing faces using different media and and to challenge yourself. Anything goes, you can use stencils and stamps to decorate, as long as the face is your own work. I've always doodled faces, but Kim's wonderful blog has inspired me to be more focused on actually creating faces of my own to use on projects. Do pop across and take a look at what the very talented Kim has been up to herself as well as the artwork being shared! This week I've been using a little vintage book of quotes and sayings to sketch in. It is inscribed and dated 1918. Those of you who follow the Dragons Dream TIO, will recall that I started creating a face in this book on Wednesday.

She was created with Portfolio Pastels with a coat of PaperArtsy Satin Glaze, and I reduced the size of the image and reshaped it into circles,which I then featured on this tag. I'm planning to use my 'Purple Girl' again as part of a printer's tray assemblage of tiny dolls some time in the future. 

For now, though, I wanted to set myself the challenge of doing two further things with faces this week. First I wanted to create a male face! Secondly I wanted to try for a likeness. And - oops - I think the English teacher part of me made an appearance!

I used a wash of PaperArtsy Snowflake before adding colour with Inktense pencils and a little water on a fine brush. I was quite pleased, as my son recognized this literary celebrity of long ago! A clue to his identity is that his most famous creation made a pact with Lucifer and that he himself met rather a violent death.

Here he is multiplied! I have plans to create a peg doll of him with Helen of Troy on the other side. He is Christopher Marlowe. I wonder if he ever imagined he would be on a peg doll? I used a portrait from the time - much as I would love to have taken a time-machine back to Elizabethan England to meet him and do a lightning sketch! Finally, still in bookish mood, I created a portrait from my imagination this time. I imagine this is what Jane Eyre might have looked like.

Side by side - I can't imagine what these two would have to say to each other! For Jane's portrait, I tried using the Inktense pencils straight onto the page without any wash so the colour was more intense and the book text didn't recede into the background so much. I think I prefer putting down a wash first; but this old paper is really nice to work on and responds to the water and pencils rather like water-colour paper. I'm  looking forward to using both these faces on different projects and eager to see what the other followers of 'Show Your Face' have been creating. I do hope you will have an opportunity this weekend to create something that brings you joy!