Face and Hair - Painting

To the right is the photograph of the little girl whose face I am painting. Below you see three stages of the painted process. You can see the lines I have put in to guide my painting. The dotted or dashed lines indicate softer edges for color transitioning. The marker I use is removed with ironing, so it does not show up on the final painting.

One of the points I am making with this post is that painting a face is often creepy. The image looks weird and unnatural until you get all of the values (light, medium and dark) in place.















In the early stages of painting a face I often look at the image and think, "Oh this is not going to work out, I'll probably have to repaint this one".  But by the time I get to the end it is OK. So my advice is, hang in there and get through the creepy stage before you make any judgments.

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Slippers

 Lately I've been showing some of the steps used to make an art quilt based on this photograph. Today's post is about the slippers. If you look closely you will see that they are orange, fuzzy slippers with skulls on them. The skulls have a pretty pink ribbon, so obviously they are girl skulls. I can see why any little girl would want to have these in her closet...


So, to start with, I found a bright orange fabric, once again in my stash. This fabric was left over from something my Mother made. It was just a little piece that I probably wasn't sure was worth keeping. As it turns out, it was perfect for the slippers.

  I laid the orange fabric over my enlarged drawing and traced the shape. Then I cut out the slipper and painted the shaded areas on the slipper.


To make the skulls I first drew them in my sketchbook and then laid some white fabric over the drawing and painted them. After they were painted I believe I fused or glued them to the orange slippers.


Here you see the finished slippers. I think they turned out pretty cute!








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Fabric Selection for Clothing

I'm going to use today's post to talk about some of the fabric I chose for this art quilt, and how I modified it. A big part of the charm of this little girl and her pose is the confidence she has in her look, as contrasted by the odd combination of clothing and accessories. I wanted to capture that as much as possible in my fabric choices.












Top fabric:

The fabric shown here, a blue, 1930's reproduction print, was what I chose for the top. I could not find a stripe that looked close enough to what she is wearing, so I settled on this. It is still good because the combination of a flower print and a stripe skirt is still pushing it, from a fashion perspective.

I laid this fabric over the enlarged line drawing and pencil traced the top outline. I also drew in the major shadow lines that are caused by the folds in the top. If you look at the photo above you can see that the light comes from the left side, and a shadow is created on the right side of the top. I put a dashed line where this shadow begins in the front of the top. This served as a  guild for me to know where to start tapering the shading.

This is what the top looks like after I did my shadow painting:



















Skirt fabric:

This fabric was in my stash and it seemed perfect for the skirt.  It is a striated hand dyed fabric.  For the skirt, I folded the fabric to mimic the folded nature of the skirt in the photo.  I did a rough cut of the outline of the skirt after folding. I then painted shaded areas on the skirt. Here is the skirt after painting:

Leggings:

Once again, my fabric stash came in handy. I found this fabric for the leggings. It is similar to the floral leggings she is wearing.

 I placed the fabric over the enlarged drawing, traced the legs and cut out the pieces. Then once again the shading was painted in. Here are painted legs:

    And there you go -  That's one dynamite outfit!

The slippers deserve a post unto themselves, so I'll do that one next. Thanks for visiting my blog!