29 faces challenge: last one!

Woohoo, I made it: 29 faces in 29 days! At times it was tough but in the end, as always, I'm happy I participated and got a lot of practice. Also tried out a few new things, like the weird faces and the scribble faces. Sad that it's over but also relieved. Here's my last face: a weirdo :-)

I hope to be able to visit all participants in the next few days. Thanks to all who followed my face-making process, I appreciate all comments! I'll be back on Thursday with a mosaic of all my faces :-)

See you then ♥ ♥ ♥

29 faces: three more

Phew, it was hard this weekend to get my faces done. So many things to do, it's always hard for me to do any art in the weekend.On Friday I made another scribble-face:

For some reason he reminds me of President Obama :-) Albeit a very sad-looking Obama .... Probably getting depressed by all the people voting for Trump. Can't blame him ... Even I am getting depressed by that! I'm still trying to make a female scribble face, but no success so far. Somehow they always turn out like men ...

The second one is a very quick one made with a new tool that I discovered yesterday thanks to Susupetal. It's called Harmony and it's something similar to Scribbler. Haven't had time to explore it but it looks like I'll be having lots of fun with it :-) It's free and you can find it here!

 Last one is another rock, for my market next weekend:

Only one more face to go!! Can't believe another month is gone already! I'll be posting it tomorrow.
Thanks for visiting, see you tomorrow! ♥

29 faces almost over ....

Only 4 more faces to go! The month has gone by too fast again. Oh well, at least I have a whole bunch of faces to make up for it :-)

For yesterday's and today's face I painted rocks again. The first weekend of March I will be doing a market, and I needed some more stock for that. Here they are: faces number 24 and 25:

I love coming up with different weird faces all the time :-) This really is a perfect way to let your imagination go wild!

And here are last week's faces.

Face nr 19: watercolour and marker

Face number 20: another miniature-painting. I will be adding a quote to this one....

And number 21: scribble-face, yes! I love doing these!

Number 22: Finally another journalpage again. Too long ago that I played in my journal....

And face 23: another weird one :-)

Linking up to Paint Party Friday, to Show your Face and to 29 faces. Hop on over there for some serious eye-candy :-)

Here's my funny for this week:

hahaha! Love the minions :-)

Thanks for  stopping by and for taking the time to comment. It's highly appreciated!

Enjoy your weekend ♥ ♥ ♥

29 faces: numbers 22 and 23!

Today I finished a face that I had started in my artjournal after making the miniature painting in the weekend. I had some leftover paint and since I don't particularly like browns and skintones as backgroundcolours, I thought I'd just make a new face with them. I only had skintone, titan buff and dark brown left, and proceeded to make a face so ghostly that it almost scared me. So I added a bit of red under the eyes, which actually made her look even more like a ghost, but something held me back from giving her more pinky cheeks. I kinda liked the ghostlike appearance :-)

Yesterday's face is another weirdo :-)

That's it for now! I'll be back on Thursday. Thanks for stopping by ♥

Faces number 19, 20 and 21

I almost didn't manage to post today, but in the nick of time, here they are: my faces from Friday until today Sunday :-)

Here's Friday's face: another watercolour - marker combination

Face number 20: miniature-painting: acrylics and collage

And today's face is another scribble-drawing :-)

That's it for now! Thanks for visiting, I'll come by your blogs tomorrow! ♥

Still doing faces .....

I had been thinking about starting another painting this week, but I've been too busy with the 29 faces challenge. It always amazes me how much time it takes to produce a face every single day. Even though I had planned to not pressure myself and just draw a circle with 2 circles in it on days that I don't have time, I find I can't do that. So what I do now is on days I have a bit more time I start several faces at once, an then I can finish them on days I have less time. It works for me, even though it's still hard work sometimes. But it's also very rewarding, because I get a lot of practice and at the end of the month I'm left with 29 faces to use and re-use in my art :-)

That said, here's my face for today: another weirdo ;-)

And yesterday's face, a miniature-painting, acrylics on canvasboard

And here are this week's faces:

Number12: yes .... weirdo .... ;-)

Number 13: watercolour sketch

Number 14: scribble-face (I'm having so much fun with these :-) )

Number 15: another miniature-painting: acrylics on canvasboard

Number 16: another scribble-face

That's it for this week. Linking to Paint Party Friday and to 29 faces, and to Show your Face. Thanks so much for visiting, and for those of you also participating in the 29 faces challenge: keep going! We're more than halfway! (eeek! meaning February is almost over ....)

I'll leave you with this funny for this week. Well, actually it's not really a funny, but I love it so much and I want to share it with you :-)

Wishing you a lovely day, and a beautiful weekend! ♥ ♥ ♥

29 faces challenge: number 15 and 16

Managed to paint a little bit yesterday. I finally made another miniature painting, but this time on a rectangular canvas of 4"x6" (10x15cm). I will be adding a quote to it later.

Face number 15: acrylics and collage on canvasboard

And face number 16 is another scribble-drawing. I really enjoy making these, and it goes really fast too! Perfect for when the days just fly by ... ;-)

That's it for now! I'll be back on Thursday! Thanks for visiting ♥ ♥ ♥

three more faces

I did a face every day for the last 3 days, but hardly went near my computer, so I'm posting the three at the same time now.

Here's Friday's face: another weird one, and it's obvious I need way more practice with the text stamps ... ;-)

Saturday's face is another watercolour with marker:

And today's face is a scribble-drawing. I had seen these drawings before and decided to try it out. It's fun, but not as easy as it looks ... And for some reason I only manage male faces with this technique ... ;-)

That's it for now. I'll be back in 2 days. Thanks for visiting!

29 faces challenge: all my faces so far :-)

The kids have one week off from school, so this week we have been painting and doing things in our new house and there wasn't that much time for art. But I did something every day! I couldn't keep up with posting every day though, so now I'm posting every 2 or 3 days. So far it's going well.

I'll show you all the faces I've made so far. Today's face was a little intuitive painting. This is what I started with:

I saw a big eye and a chin ....

So I brought it out ....

This is yesterday's face: watercolour sketch:

I don't use watercolours very much, but every time I do I really enjoy it. It works a lot faster than acrylics which comes in handy when you're short on time :-)

And here are the other faces I did until now:
The first one: sketch in graphite 

Second one: another small intuitive painting

Third one: the first of my weird ones ;-)

Number 4: another sketch in graphite

Fifth face: a quick ink-drawing

Sixth face: graphite and marker

Face number 7: another weird one (I will have to practice a lot more with these text stamps .... :-) )

Number 8: the one with the bird in her hair...

And the 10th face: coloured pencil sketch inspired by Jane Davenport

That's it for now. Can't believe I did 11 faces already! This is such a fun challenge! And very good practice!

That's it for now. Thanks so much for visiting and commenting in such beautiful ways. I will get back to visit everyone who comments here, even if it takes a few days :-)

Linking to Paint Party Friday, to Show your Face and to 29 faces. Hop on over to those blogs and treat yourself to some eye-candy!

Finishing with my funny of the week:

hahaha ... right! I do that :-)

I'll be back in 2 days with my next 2 faces! See you then ♥ ♥ ♥

29 faces: 2 more!

Two faces today, the one from yesterday and the one from today.

Yesterday's is a sketch with graphite and marker:

And the one from today is a coloured pencil drawing inspired by Jane Davenport:

I hope tomorrow I will have time to paint something!
I'll be back in 2 days :-) Thanks for visiting ♥

29 faces: getting in trouble ....

Hmm, a face a day: not always easy but still managable. Scanning it in and blogging about it every day: not so..... So from now on I'll post every 2 days, might make it a bit easier :-)

Did one of my weird faces today, but didn't write a quote next to it yet. You'll see that when I show an overview of my faces for this week :-)

Thanks for visiting! I'll be back in 2 days with 2 new faces!

29 faces: face nr 6

Weekends are always very difficult to get any art done. It's way past bedtime already but since I'd been drawing and finishing this face, I figured I could just as well put in on my blog. So here she is: a little experiment with hairdo's ;-)

See you tomorrow!

29 faces: Face number 5: a quickie

No time today, so I just made a very quick pen drawing. Promised myself not to be too picky in what I show. Some days there just isn't enough time ... ;-)

Thanks so much for your visit and your wonderful comments! I promise I'll get back to you all this weekend ♥

Take me home again

I finished my painting! There were times in the last few months I thought I was never going to finish it, but this new year I started working on it in earnest and I couldn't stop anymore.

I love painting on a large canvas like that, it's a totally different experience. It's harder in a way too, because I always turn my canvases around all the time, and with a large, heavy frame like this one that wasn't always easy.

This painting went through so many stages I even lost track of how many layers there are actually on it. But there are lots!

I'll show you the process from start to finish, although I didn't take pictures every step of the way. Sometimes I just sprayed some colour on there as I was passing on my way to somewhere else...

Since most of the pictures were taken on dark, dreary days, the colours are sometimes very drab. The pictures of the finished painting are more or less how it is in "real life".

I'll have to warn you though: it's a long way down before you get to see the finished painting. If you don't want to see all the in-progress pics, just scroll down to the bottom of this post ;-)

This is how it all started:

stamps, stencils and random marks

using lots of water to spread the paint around

adding more marks

and drips of course (my favorite ☺)

trying to soften all the lines

and adding some contrast - ugh

moving into the ugly stages ...

more of the same

no images are appearing to me, so I just keep layering on top

brightening it up a bit

I keep turning the canvas. Still no idea what I 'm doing or where I'm going

brightening it up again.... oh my .... all my marks have disappeared again....

making new marks *sigh ....

at this point I'm starting to see quite a few images: a big dog in front, and 4 faces! But this is around Christmas time and I don't have time to work on it during a week or so, and after that week the images don't appeal to me at all. So what do I do?

Right, I drip some more .... Will there ever be an end to it?

turns out there is .... I can see the outlines of 2 faces in the bottom right

so I bring them to life :-)

And then it goes fast: I see one bird, and while I'm painting it 2 more birds appear

And two faces that were there before and refused to disappear ....

discover an owl in the bottom left corner

now I just need to bring it all together .... (which is often the hardest part)

I had been trying to stay with purple and pink tones (beside the blue), but after I'd painted this bright blue the pinks and especially the purples started bothering me, so I followed my heart and went for my favorite colours: oranges and yellows.

I know now where I'm going with this canvas, but there's one thing that keeps bothering me: the left figure in the foreground. It's a male (I think), and I have no idea what to do about his hair. I try different hairdo's (sorry, didn't take any pictures of those) but none feels right. So I make some circles raining down on his head ...

but don't like it and cover them up again...

In the end I just start moving the paint around with my fingers and somehow he gets a kind of white cloudy hairdo. While I kinda like it, I find it doesn't fit with the rest of the painting and it keeps bothering me.

So I finish the rest of the painting while I keep thinking what to do with his/her/its hair .... In the end I decide on a sort of hat / headband / whatever .... I think it suits him ...

So here's the finished painting:

"take me home again" - acrylics on canvas - 100x100 cm (39,4 x 39,4 inches)

While I was finishing this painting, I realised that for me it represented Australia: the birds, the reds and yellows of the earth, the bright blues of the sky and the oceans, the feeling of longing and home. The country that I fell in love with years ago, and was allowed to call my home for more than 3 years. It still sits in my soul and will stay there. Even though we moved back to Belgium, a part of me stayed behind in Australia and I will always long to get it back. When I look at this painting I feel joy and happiness and longing and sadness all at the same time. How I love it when my feelings get translated onto the canvas without me realizing it. That is for me the biggest discovery of painting intuitively.

So, after this avalanche of pictures, I have a few more things to share, so I better make it quick :-)

First of all: the 29 faces challenge! It's been going really well, and I've been enjoying making a face every day. I have been blogging about it too every day. Not sure whether I'll be able to keep that up though. Since this post is already so long, I'll just show today's face, which is number 4:

You can find the other faces here, here and here.

Secondly: this week I received a lovely package from Jackie. I "met" Jackie online last year and have been enjoying reading her most inspiring blogposts and seeing her wonderful creative art. After asking her about a colourful fruit she showed on her blog, she sent me a whole bag of seeds together with a beautiful artwork and a big bag of "white Christmas"-candy, a delicious sweet that she makes every year with Christmas. Here's a picture of the beautiful tag she made me:

It's so nice to see it in real life, after seeing so many lovely creations on her blog. And I'm looking forward to seeing my own colourful fruit grow. Hope I don't mess it up! Thanks Jackie, you're a sweetheart!

Thirdly: since it's a new month again, I made another wallpaper that you can download if you want:

You can download it here. It should work, please let me know if it doesn't!

Phew, this is it at last. Linking to Paint Party Friday, to Show Your Face and to 29 faces. Go have a look at all these links, so many beautiful and creative things to see and admire!

Thanks for visiting and reading right through to the end ;-) Hope your day is going great, and your weekend will be full of joy. And since I have so many pictures already in this post, one more won't hurt. Here's my funny for this week:

hahaha :-D

See you tomorrow for the next face! ♥ ♥ ♥