PaperArtsy Challenge Entry ..... I caved in!

Happy Sunny Sunday All........

....well, it is here at any rate! 

The challenge over on the PaperArtsy blog for the past two weeks has been 'Faces' introduced by Leandra HERE.  There has been some amazing inspiration as always from the designers and my own personal favourite was Darcy's fabulous skull clock HERE.  However, right from the get go I wasn't remotely interested in making an entry myself .......that was until Friday evening when I went back over some of the posts I'd missed and also took a look at the lovely entries to the challenge from other crafters! 

So, I picked up a very soft pencil from a sketching kit I have and my A6 journal (a gift from my friend Sam) and started to sketch some facial features.  I was totally surprised and chuffed with how it was shaping up and decided to go over it with a sepia pastel stick from the same set.  With hindsight (wonderful thing that ;D) I should have rubbed most of the pencil lines out first but I still didn't think this face was going to be shown to anyone.  I was convinced I would muck it up completely when I started to add to the page!

I forgot to mention the page I chose already had a pinky wash of left over paint.  From here I stamped a butterfly (PA Hot Pick 1203) on her cheek using Black Archival Ink and thought......That's it, I've messed it up!  It looked horrible so I went to bed in disgust, lol!

Yesterday morning I took another look and thought it couldn't look much worse if I messed about with it some more so I started playing with the background but unfortunately I didn't take pics of the steps because I still didn't think it would be shown.  First I stamped an image from Hot Pick 1304 using 3rd generation Sepia Archival Ink, then using a couple of stencils, also from PaperArtsy, Mini Texturised with Distress Inks and Mini Moving Vines with Fresco Finish paints.  

You can just make out the girl hidden by the vines! I stamped the wording from the new release Hot Pick 1506 using Black Archival and then decided to use pencils to add a bit of subtle shading to the vines.

Then I plucked up courage to go back to the butterfly!  At first I stamped and embossed it using white onto acetate and cut it out.  I thought I'd overlay it to reduce the effect of the black butterfly but I wasn't really happy.  Then I decided to colour in the butterfly with pencils (I could have used Frescos but the pencils were already out) and Voila! I loved it!!!

At the last minute I added a bit of white pencil to the eye, lips and butterfly and some second and third generation stamping of a PA mini script stamp.

 

I am so pleased the other entrants to the challenge shamed me into having a go because this is the first time I have ever come close to achieving something that looks fairly realistic.  Maybe I should take some lessons from my Art Tutor Son who's portraits are amazing and you can see some of them HERE on my Pinterest board if you're interested.

I'm off to link up to the PaperArtsy Blog as the deadline is in a few hours time.  Thanks for visiting today.

Hugs

Lesley  Xx