Shaking up the Muse – Part 3

We left the High Priestess Painting in part 2 a very basic state with just a purple wash covering my base  drawing.  A few days after the purple was dry and I came back to the painting.  I made my first major change to my initial idea.  The initial idea had the priestess in a temple with drapery in the background.

I changed my mind and now she will be outside so using a mix of blue and white, I painted in the background.  I didn’t mix the blue and white completely, I wanted the background to be streaky as it sometimes is on a lightly cloudy day.  I took the sky down to very close to the bottom because I wanted to have a lot of depth to work with.

Now I have to wait for the blue and white to dry so I am leaving the painting at this point for now and moving onto another part of the piece, the priestesses face.

I showed you my original clay face in part 2, with no color on it.  I colored it in and in my opinion, she turned out looking like a hooker with a hair-lip.  Not the look I was going for.

I had to make a new face, and this time, corrected some of the flaws in the mold before baking the clay.  In the first face I used only my colored pencils.  On the second face I used acrylic paints.

I wasn’t happy with either face and on a trip to the craft store found a face mold that I liked much better.   I also bought a block of beige clay from each of the four brands that the store carried, Sculpey 3, Premo, Fimo, and Kato.  I made a face out of each of the clays because I wasn’t sure which clay I would like best.  The clays I had used for the first two faces were hand blended so not something I could repeat which is why I chose to do the trial.

The faces in order from left to right are – Sculpey 3, Premo, Fimo, Kato.  I decided I liked the color and texture of the Sculpey 3 face best so I decided to use a mixture of acrylic paints for the eyes, pencil for the lips and brows, and used my own personal blush for her checks.  I think she turned out pretty well.

The next steps will be to work on the background of the painting some more.  To do that I have to wait for the first layer to dry.  The blue and white was put down very thickly so it may take a week or so for it to dry.  Oil Painting is not a quick process.

While I wait for the background to dry I will turn my attention to a painting that I have mostly finished.  This is the Magician, the first in my Tarot series.

The Magician represents skill, diplomacy, determination, self confidence, and action.

He is almost done but missing a certain something.  Check back soon to see what I do with him.

Heather blogs from her home in Wisconsin.  If you want to see more of her work you can go here.