Show Your Face on Friday, Pierrot

Hello Followers and Friends, welcome to Magpieheaven! I can't believe how quickly the days have flown by and it's time once again for Kim Dellow's fabulous 'Show Your Face on Friday'. This is the blog spot that has really kept me hooked on faces since I first linked up what seems like ages ago. Do please check it out here, if you want to be inspired by Kim and all the fantastic artists who join her each week; and why not create a face yourself, link up and join in the fun? I was going to create something completely different this week, but for a reason that will - I hope - become clear later today, I created two more little sketches in a similar style to last week.This is where I began!

I blended washes of PaperArtsy paints in Teresa Green, Blue Oyster and Nougat in my mixed media sketch book. I then took my 6B pencil, tortillian and Graphik marker and started to create a portrait of a pierrot. I really like to use the soft 6B pencil with the tortillian to create shadow around the eyes with a little fine lining for definition. Coincidentally, Kim has been sharing some shading tips this week and talking about light and shade. I was reading an artist talking about this very thing last week, as she discussed exploring the dark and the light spaces between what we think we see!

I love images of pierrots on ATCs and many of the first rubber stamps I bought when I began crafting featured pierrot images. It might have been seeing pierrot prints in my great grandma's house as a small child that sparked this fascination with the white-faced, tender-hearted zany. I wanted to see if I could transfer the vintage pierrot look to Tim Burton's style.

I enjoyed drawing over the painted background and using some Inktense pencils to create a touch of extra colour. I finished off with a layer of white Pan Pastel, which I sprayed with fixative. I wanted to suggest the chalky, translucence of the pierrot make-up. 

Although Tim Burton's style has been the starting point with these recent sketches, I have been trying to use him as an inspiration for stylised drawings, which are not - I hope - just Tim copies but a way of helping me to step outside my comfort zone and try expressing character in a new way. This next fantasy is something of a combination of my take on Tim Burton and Frida Kahlo's deer transformed into a centaur - without the wounding!

 She bears a passing resemblance to my daughter, Matilda looking a tad uneasy to have woken in an enchanted forest, metamorphosed into this creature. Now I think there's another story waiting to be told!

 Last week I experimented with placing my portrait of 'Fairy Debs' on an ATB, which I sent the real life Debs!

It was fun to have the back and sides of the block to play with and co-ordinate with the portrait. The scan was on a plain white background, but  I coloured this, again with Inktense.

I think it looks very different with the coloured background and the textures and the text on the sides and back. 

The image below gives some idea of the size of the ATB with a magpie feather for scale. An image can look so different when it is reduced or increased in size.

Embossed copper foil sides, painted and then sanded and edges lightly touched with Treasure Gold added a little bit of fairy dust!

And then stamping over a background with a little stencilling and shaded PaperArtsy Fresco blues: Antarctic, Smurf and Inky Pool seemed to finish off the project nicely.

Thank you so much for stopping by Magpieheaven today. I hope you have a wonderful creative week and that you will create a face or faces and link up to Kim's blog. It doesn't matter what style you choose, or what media as long as the face you create is drawn by you.