Show Your Face on Friday - Wearable Portraits!

Hello and Welcome to Magpieheaven! We're still undergoing our bathroom transformations so I've been ensconcing myself in my little crafting corner and making faces - not at the plummer; but as a kind of art therapy to take my mind off all the muddle around me! I'd like to link up with Kim Dellow's 'Show Your Face' blog this week and share some of my experiments with wearable portraits! Kim has a prompt this month, courtesy of Gibby Frogett and it's 'Quick Draw Faces'. I hope to have a go at some lightning sketches in the next few weeks, but for now I just wanted to share the jewellery I've been working on.

The idea of making jewellery began with a wonderful online course I took last Summer with Mary Jane Chadbourne. This course was called Tinytopia and Mary Jane shared some of her techniques and ideas for creating miniature houses from wood and MDF. She suggested we might like to turn the tiniest houses into brooches and I was inspired by the detail and the beauty of her miniature art to create little wearable house people! I cut the shapes from MDF and collaged my own art onto them adding an embellishment or two! The lady above is inspired by a friend's daughter who loves elephants. I had so much fun researching elephants in Indian art and story and creating my own elephant art especially for her. I wonder what secrets this Lilliputian elephant and his guardian with her magical, all-seeing eye might hide behind their little jade and copper door?

With the same friend in mind, I created another Elephant Princess, this time with charms and a face on a crackled heart. I think the silver charms take on a new character when they are painted with bright colours. For these faces, I paint the hearts black and then add a thin layer of PaperArtsy Crackle Glaze. When that's quite dry, I paint over with thick, single strokes of Fresco Finish Nougat before adding features in pen and water-colour. I finish everything with wood finishing spray.

The fun part is definitely adding those features. Strange as it sounds, the little faces seem to form themselves under the Micron pens. A Pierrot sighs over her broken heart...

Natasha opens her arms to us in a warm embrace...

another clown dreams of hundreds of smiling sunny faces forgetting their cares as they watch her act. I've also experimented with creating earrings to match the little house brooches...

and several people have suggested I create pendants, so here is my first pendant, which I'm planning to give as a gift to a friend.

Thank You so much for dropping by Magpiehaven today and taking a peep at my little gallery of wearable portraits. I hope that your week will be a happy and a creative one.