Friday Face Off

Hi everyone. Happy Friday. I hope everyone is having a great week and will enjoy the upcoming weekend.

Today I have a page for Nicole's Friday Face Off. I'm not sure my page is finished yet, but it might be as I don't know where I want to go with it.

I started my page by drawing the male face in the middle of the page. It was a quick sketch, and colored with Faber-Castell markers, except I did give the hair a light coat of bronze paint. I'm not sure he's very handsome, (and the space between the upper lip and nose looks a little too big), but I'm not unhappy with him.

Then I stamped some little squares around the page and took a  light pink ink pad and rubbed it randomly around the page. I also added the girl's face. I didn't draw that face, but instead I copied her off a magazine page using my gelli-print plate.  It's a pretty easy technique as long as you use a glossy magazine page. I used the summer issue of Art Journaling by Somerset Studio (2021), and I apologize as I don't have the original artist's name.

To make a gelli print transfer, you need to put a very thin coat of acrylic paint on your plate. ( I give a couple of squeezes of my paint tube and then use a brayer to roll the paint thinly across the entire plate.) Give it a couple of seconds to start to dry; it is better to use a paint that dries relatively quickly and not something that takes too long like heavy body acrylics. But don't let the paint totally dry out. The time it takes to pick up your magazine page and put it down on the plate is really all the time you need to let the paint start drying if your coat is thin enough. 

I laid the magazine image on the wet paint and used my brayer to roll over the magazine page to be sure it made complete contact with the paint. Give it a couple of seconds, and then lift the magazine page. Voila, there is a transfer left on your plate and you can then take your own art paper and pick up the image by pressing it in on the plate. I find this transfer doesn't give you  every detail or colored area, but on my female face the outline came through. I was then able to use markers for her eyes and lips, as well as watercolor paints for her skin and hair and finish her the way I wanted to.

I tried getting a second print from the same magazine page, but when I brayered the image onto to paint covered plate, it picked up a lot of the paint and was done with the  transferring process. 

To finish my page I took a print I also made using a 12x12 number stencil and some colored paints. I cut out a couple of the numbers on that print and added them to my journal page. 

I kept thinking about what story this page was telling, and one thing that kept popping into my head was how these 2 people were separated by space and maybe even time. Because of that I covered part of the page with a map printed piece of acetate I had.

There you have it. Is it finished, maybe. 

I am also linking to Gillena's Friday Lunch Break.

Have a nice weekend, and thanks for visiting my blog.