Happy New Year!

Hello dear friends and fellow bloggers!
I miss blogging and I miss you all! So I have decided to schedule my time for blogging and other computer related time more strictly this coming year. I hope it will work!
I have been practicing faces all year long and I enjoy it very much. I have mostly done drawings in graphite and charcoal and recently I've started painting again with acrylics, which I enjoy very much. There has come a lot of color into my paintings :-)

Now here's some of my art inspired by the old masters:

"La Bella Pricipessa" by Leonardo da Vinci, this painting is acrylic on watercolor paper. I've got it framed, which makes it look like a real piece of art! 

 Isabella d'Este by Titian, graphite and pastel drawing on my favorite "drawing paper", not finished

 Catharina van Aragon by Juan De Flandes. 

I'm still working on this! It is hopefully going to hang on a wall in our local hospital in the cancer tracing/control section. I've accompanied someone last summer, who was diagnosed with cancer and it was such a dreary place. So I immediately thought it would be nice, if there were some beautiful pictures hanging on the wall. I'm going to ask the hospital, if they would like some art for their walls. Luckily the person I was with, did get an operation that was able to remove the cancer.

Wishing everyone a year of hope and with possibilities to move on in your life in a way that you wish for. Sometimes that can be hard to accomplish, maybe we need to change our point of view to be able to move or to see other possibilities…

And sometimes only the tinyest steps are possible.

My best wishes to you

Ilona

Sharing this with the wonderful people at Paint Party Friday

And also at: Art Journal Journey (which is a first for me)

PPF visit

Hello my dear friends, fellow bloggers and new visitors!

Today I'll show you a single piece on this blog and give you a link to a new blog, where I show my 29 Faces in September work. I have just started the blog that I am going to use for my teaching courses (art and language).

Here is the painting I have been working on the last three days:

It is painted with acrylics, charcoal and pastels. I have concidered adding a wash of acrylic in another color, but I'm not quite sure.

Thank you for visiting my blog! I hope I'll get around to everyone over the weekend!

Have a great Paint Party Friday!

Ilona

Making art and waiting for the new week to start

I've been working on a few things and still preparing for the show. I've also managed to add two canvases collaged and painted ready to hang on monday!!! Suddenly time is getting short and it's my second sons birthday on saturday too, so a day full of celebration and guests and delicious cakes and food for family and friends...mmh!

Here is what i produced lately:

The riding woman is my first painting with gouache paint only, on a paper splattered with a little water colour.

The painting below is for the exhibition:

worked on a square canvas (the photo didn't cover it all, sorry). I painted her after a digital sketch I have made some time ago...:

Before I sketched and collaged her on the canvas I did quite a lot of preparation. The canvas had been covered with a mixture of paint, earth and glue, which gave it a very rough texture. (I did this last year and then I put it aside, not knowing what to do further). Tiny stones are still visible in places.
Now I have started collaging backgrounds recently, you can see examples of it here and here and I just thought the very rough background could use some smoothness, so I found some of my torn up papers, strips this time that I glued onto the canvas. Then I played with different colours and mixed acrylics with liquid water colour. I let it dry and sketched the woman onto the canvas, collaged her in rice paper, because of the subtleness the paper has and the background would still be visible! I sketched on top of it with charcoal and added colour to her with water colour pencils. To me she looks very strong and determined, just what I really want to become - that's why I want to keep her! ;-)

The following face is sketched after one of Lucas Cranach the Elder's paintings. She is painted and drawn on water colour paper with some acrylic splatters serving as a nice background.

Last but not least a sketch in charcoal/pastel:

This was it for today/this week :-)

I enjoy very much concentrating on making art most of the days. How lucky am I? Soon other tasks will fill some of the space, giving Danish courses for parents at the local school. But that will hopefully be a good change, meeting people to talk to and hopefully have fun with!

So on monday will be the day when we put up the art and on thursday the 5. September there is a vernissage for interested people. A bit scary, but hopefully also a good experience, as I already know of a few people/friends, who will be there and make it all worth the nerves :-)

Hope you will have time to make art and stop by and visit the great artist gathering on Eva and Kristin's blog for the Paint Party Friday! 

Thank you for visiting!

Ilona 

Playing again with Faces, Birds and Paper-rolls

After some stressful weeks, a few days of easiness and playing with my art supplies give me new energy for the written exam coming next week.

So here is my collection of faces I have worked on:

This is painted after a photograph. To depict her pale skin, with little shadow in the face, was quite difficult. Unfortunately the camera does not capture the pale colouring very well.

In the second photograph I had added some warmer shades (yellow) hue, but it is not really visible. I'll work a little more on this portrait, before it's finished!

And the other portrait is another face in my little square sketchbook.

Now to the birds :-)

I havetold you about the international art collaboration last week, and for this I have started to train my 

skills in drawing from nature and drawing birds.

The girl was started some time ago. As the sun has been out a lot more this week, I have been sitting outside in my garden, drawing our little apple-tree behind the girl.

And on a paper-roll I started drawing some exotic birds. Originally thinking of cutting them out, but they make a nice decoration all painted in their colourful feather-dresses.

Below you see it all at a glance :-)

And a Jambufruitdove on my new smooth drawing paper WIP

And one extra for Paper Saturday, inspired by Manon's post today:

A collaged match-box (WIP)

Art is really giving me so much, because I can relax and enjoy myself. It is kind of meditating. (I read that somewhere, and for me it is true!)

Thank you for visiting and commenting. I appreciate your feedback more than I can say. It has kept me going during a hard time of studying language and teaching. 

Have a wonderful weekend!

Linking up with Paint Party Friday

and

Paper Saturday

Not for PPF today, just for you and me :-)

To begin with I want to thank all my visitors from last week! It was amazing to get so many comments on my blogpost! I really appreciate your comments and love to visit all your places and leave a word for you too!
Some of you have changed your set up, so I was not able to comment, as I haven't joined Google+. I may need to look at that, but not now.

Today I will not link to PPF, as I know I don't have time to visit a 100 blogs the next few days, but I will visit everyone who leaves a comment!
I have done a little something during the week, and signed up for an exquisite corpse round, which I am looking forward to very much! It will be great fun, I hope, with a special group of people, who came together, and agreed on no restrictions for our paintings/drawings ... rather exciting!

Here are a few things I have played with:

Small pieces of art for my art abandonment. I wanted to do some colorful pieces for people to be found. I also agreed with Lauri from the US to send her some pieces to abandon in the states and vice versa. I'm looking forward to that!

Here are now a few WIP for abandonment:

For one of my collaborations I want to prepare a piece of fabric with gesso, to send around the world and paint with five or six other artists. To find out if it works, I have gessoed two different kinds of fabric yesterday. Here are photos after one layer of gesso, I might need to give them another layer.

I have made a sketch of a woman's face, which I want to draw with colored pencils:

I hope I will be able to draw her, so people, who know her will recognize her! :-)

And as preparation for the exquisite corpse round I have played with linol prints. One I finished:

The other I needed to sketch onto the linol, before I forgot the idea!

Hope you enjoyed the "show" and now to the real world and the hard work. Wish me luck with my study products! Still a lot of writing to do as preparation for the exam.

Have a wonderful week-end everyone!

After some illness back with some art

I have been ill since Easter and though I have been able to make some drawings and other stuff I was not really fit for blogging. But I want to show you the proceedings with my Face in the World group and a few other paintings and drawings I have been working on.

Starting with the Face in the World: I had a few ideas for this face. Should I give her hair? I really liked the idea, but was not sure if it was the right thing to do with this one...

So I tried with some tulle once in white as hat and ruff...

And a black veil, but I was not convinced, so I gave it a little more time and finally I decided

to give her a dress. As a tailor this was a fantastic option and I found some fabric matching her eyes and tulle to go with it. I stitched the edges and sewed the tulle onto the fabric with my sewing machine and added some beads and a tiny rose of tulle and fabric... now she is sent off to Audrey Breed and after her Milo Wylde Chin to make her complete! :-) A real delight to do this!

The next painting was quite untouched, meaning that apart from Beth who will receive her back in the end, nobody had worked on the painting. Beth Gould had used layers of paper collaged and there is Japanese writing included and I thought I would like to give her this Japanese touch and found a beautiful picture of a Japanese girl to paint from. I would have liked to continue working on her, as I think she is rather special, but she is also sent off to Audrey Breed in Tennessee! 

I now want to show you a few portraits and drawings I have worked on. 

There is this WIP, the little girl from Constantin Hansen, a Danish artist from the mid 1800.

And this painting/drawing in acrylic and pastels, both soft and oils

and an old man with wild hair, though it was even wilder in the photo!

Finally I have a drawing of a poppy-seed head:

Please visit the amazing artists at Paint Party Friday

Paint Party Friday

Something new today:

I've found a skirt, which was only half finished, from somebody who participated in a sewing session with me once. It is a white cotton skirt without any pattern in the weave or anything.

So I took it downstairs with me and started smudging it with some leftover paint.

Then I took a linol cut of a woman done some time ago and covered her with pastel and sprayed it with my hairspray.

I printed one side of the skirt with the linol. I used two different purple/violets. This worked all right, as the skirt already is all smudgy. I think it doesn't have to be perfect prints, but they are clearly visible.

On the other side of the skirt I drew a face of a young girl all smiling, I'm glad she will not see it, but for this purpose it is ok.

And a cat's face, Frankie! 

Some more photos, but there is still room for more drawings :-)

I have found some figures and faces in the blots of acrylics, maybe you can find a few of them?

You can enlarge the photos, by right click on your mouse and open it in a new window.

I will add some doodling before I call it finished, so off to work!
Have done some! :-)

And you! Take a look at PPF artists all around the world

I am also participating in the 29 faces-challenge. If you would like to see some of the faces I have done so far you can find them under the tag: 29 faces in the sidebar

7 and 8 of 29 faces

Some playing around with acrylic and pastels on a calendar page

and a game of Moulin Rouge

See also: 29 faces on other artists blogs, it is a tremendous journey! So fantastic to be in the game!