Show Your Face, Sirens! Inspired by Deborah Wainwright.

Hello and welcome to Magpieheaven! Today I'm linking up with Kim Dellow's fabulous 'Show Your Face' blog challenge. I'm a little bit late, as the blog where artists 'show their faces' went live at 10.00 am yesterday, but life has been a bit hectic and this has been the first few minutes I've had to blog in a little while. I just couldn't let a week go by without a visit to Kim's place, where we can get together to share the faces we've drawn. You can find out all about it here - and Kim's challenge to us to be inspired by one another during the month of August! I think this is a wonderful idea and I'm sure when you see the great work Kim has been doing and the fabulous contributions by the other artists, you'll be inspired too! This week my inspiration has been Deborah Wainwright and a portrait blog she did last time. Now a really spooky thing has happened and I think I'm going to have to contact Debs about this!!! I decided to be inspired by the way that faces appear out of the background, asking to be created in Deb's work. Usually I begin a face and then add my layers. With Deb's technique I would have to let the shapes and textures speak and a face or faces to be born out of them. Imagine my surprise when I went to make a link to Deb's blog and discovered she had been inspired by me! We didn't get together on this one - honestly! Anyway, here is what I created inspired by letting the girls grow out of the medium.

I took a watercolour paper post-card and sprinkled it with a little Primary Elements and then spritzed. This was at about midnight last night, so I'm sorry I wasn't able to photograph the initial shape on the page. I took a heat-gun and dried it, allowing the watery patterns to marble their way across the paper. Then I took a fine black pen and started to doodle faces. I had intended there to be one face only, but these girls started to appear! I think they are sirens, the sea nymphs whose lovely singing lured sailors to destruction on the rocks around their island. I had never thought about them as individuals before, but as I drew, each siren seemed to form with her own character. Not one of them looks entirely comfortable with her role, I think! The one in the front looks to me as if she is about to sing, but she's looking to her companions for assurance. They seem determined to avoid her gaze and the one at the very top seems to be turning her head away and gazing with concern at - what - the impending doom of the sailors? So were the sirens unable to help themselves? Had they no choice but to sing, sorrowful in the knowledge that their magical music, beautiful as it was, would mean death for the mortal sailors?

I added some details with Inktense pencils and went over some of my ink doodling with a little water to soften the lines. At this point I just had to get to bed! I had really enjoyed creating the sirens and using the Primary Elements with watercolour paper - something I've never done before. It was really exciting too, to let the patterns on the paper tell their story to me and to allow the sirens to grow out of the page. So thank you Debs, for luring me out of my comfort zone!

You might remember that last week I created a five minute portrait of Frida Kahlo? I needed to send a card to a friend to thank her for her kindness and I know she is a fan of Frida, so - with a little collage added, some heavy outlining with 6B pencil and black marker and some stencilling I turned the portrait into a card. Thank you so much for stopping by Magpieheaven today! I hope you will have some time to create a face or faces this weekend and link your work to Kim's 'Show Your Face' too.