Show Your Face on Friday - In the Style of Elena Polenova

Hello and Welcome to Magpieheaven! I'm a little late linking to my favourite 'Show Your Face on Friday' blog this week. By the time I'm ready to publish this it will be Saturday! I try not to miss, as since discovering Kim Dellow's wonderful blog I've become totally addicted to drawing faces. If you haven't done so already, please do check out 'Show Your Face' and - if you can - add a link to any face or faces you might have created this week. Last week I was unwell, so I don't think I got round to visiting many of the wonderful artists linked up, so this week I will try to remedy this. It's still November so the theme is to share established artists who have inspired us, but any portrait art you would like to share is fine. Please check on how to participate here.
I'm still very much in the illustration zone. Last week I mentioned the fairy tale illustration of Elena Polenova and I think her very Russian style of illustration really seeped into my imagination after seeing her work for the first time last winter. Although I did not consciously aim to copy her style, some brooches I wood burned this week seem to me to have been influenced by the colours from her art and the style of her illuminated pages.

What I love about illustration is that it gives you the freedom to give a face to anything you want to!

Do you - like me - often see faces in trees?

Looking at these again I'm beginning to think that a collection of Christmas tree ornaments on the theme of trees with faces might be quite effective - a whole talking forest!

I wonder what these little characters are saying to each other as the snow falls gently onto their branches?

I have also been creating a Christmas ornament that features a face as its focal point.  I wanted to create something a little different on this resin heart from Sandra Evertson's Relics and Artifacts range.

From about the age of seven to eleven, my Christmas stocking always contained a ballet book of some kind and one year, as a very special treat, my mother bought us tickets for the ballet. My mother's cousin who lived with us for a while and who I loved because she told me such beautiful stories bought me a vinyl record of Moira Shearer telling the story of Swan Lake to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky's ballet score. The milk white tutus like swans' down and all the glitter and glamour of the Dance became synonymous with Christmas for me from then on!

In the ballet, based on Russian folk tale a young maiden, Odette is under the spell of an evil magician and doomed to live as a swan by day and a maiden by night. I painted Odette's portrait straight onto the heart at the centre of this ex voto heart, using PaperArtsy Fresco paints in Nougat with a touch of London Bus, which I quickly wiped away around the cheeks. The  surface was really great for painting on and I added definition with a fine, black pen. The swans are a painted charm defined with a little Treasure Gold.

I painted the edge of the heart with Little Black Dress, then added a layer of Crackle Glaze and , when this was dry, I painted over with Antarctic, Blue Oyster and Teresa Green Frescos. I added some glitter and some Shaved Ice mica flakes along with these leaves from a broken brooch, painted and gilded and some painted resin roses. I created Odette's feathery head-dress using PaperArtsy Metallic Glaze mixed with Snowflake with a tiny piece of Indian mirror at the centre, which I hope will reflect the tree lights.

Thank you so much for stopping by today. The tree brooches are on sale in my Etsy shop, but each year I like to  have at least one new Christmas ornament. This year it is going to be some of my own art work on my Swan Lake Relics and Artifacts heart.