Whimsical Girls

I was writing in a previous post about an artist named Tamara Laporte, working under the name of Willowing. I purchased a series of art lessons of her webpage and started taking her lessons bit by bit, it is slow going during the summer holidays when all the kids are at home and „under my paintbrushes“ so to speak.

One of the most recent lessons was called „The Happy Traveller“ and the subject was a front facing whimsical girl with a travelling companion (or several) and a little paper pouch for a message to myself. I really enjoyed painting this girl, Willowing went into great detail how she is shading faces and all the little details that go into it. She also makes a lot of use of collage and brayering with acrylic paints.

This is my Happy Traveller:

As you can see she is already framed and hanging in my living room. She is my first whimsical painting I framed and put on display, so of course she is very special to me. She is supposed to be happy, I am still working on facial expressions; at least she does not look tortured, just a little sad. I used watersoluble crayons, gelatos, acrylic paints, matt medium, tissue paper and international stamps for collage, white and black paint pens and pencils for added colour and shading.

I can not really recommend using modern stamps for collage, their surface is slightly water and paint resistant and not easy to work with so I ended up covering some again with tissue paper to tone them down.

I also used the ghostly flowers again, the same ones I made for the postcard swap last month.

I really enjoyed this class and can only recommend it, I am looking forward to my next willowing lesson.

But first I made another whimsical girl, this time I tried to work and build up the face layers from memory, to get a feel for what happens when I use different paints and techniques together. This time however I was a little uncertain what to do for a background. I seldom plan my girls, they just grow and „happen“ to be quite honest. My husband suggested a red fiery inferno, my own plan had been some cool green foliage forest design behind her. So I decided I could try out both and decide later...

I cut out her outlines and made the background on the front and back of a separate piece of watercolour paper: reversible. For the undecided viewer ;-)

I used my watersoluble crayons and gelatos, acrylic paints and paint pens, watercolour markers and tissue paper for the collage on her collar amd sleeves.

I am not sure, she still needs a little something to set her off optically a little bit more from the background. Maybe a slight shadow line? Or a halo of sorts?