I have been taking the courses over at Doll Dreams for a couple months now and I can't recommend them enough.  They are so much fun and Adriana breaks it all down so I really think anyone can do these.  They aren't meant to be realistic but they sure are pretty and fun to draw.  Here are a few of the pieces I have done from these classes.

I would highly recommend the classes on this site to anyone looking to create pretty, little ladies. 

Today marks the start of "BIG" over at Dirty Footprints Studio.   I am so excited, almost too excited I am afraid.  You see I have this idea that this course is going to change my life, not just my artistic life but my real life as well.  I am not sure I can even explain why I feel this way but I do.  What makes me a little afraid is that when I usually come into something with such high expectations I am almost always disappointed, but I am not going to worry about that now.  I am just going to paint big and fearless and let this journey take me where it will.  No worry, no doubt, just letting the paint flow.  

Below is a fearless painting that I did last weekend.  I had painted the background over a month ago when I was playing with the new fiber paste I had bought but I had no idea what I wanted to do on top of it.  Last weekend I decided to paint a face.  I had done quite a few faces but never have I just picked up my brush and painted one.  I always draw them out first so I can make them pretty, but this time I just picked up the brush and went with it.  She isn't perfect, here face is lopsided (my husband nicely suggested perhaps she has the mumps) and the texture I had been playing around with underneath kind of looks like acne.  I was tempted to try to "fix" her, paint more hair over the lopsided part of her face but the more I looked at her the more she told me that just like all of us she is perfect just the way she is.  She doesn't need to conform to conventional ideas of beauty.  So I didn't fix her instead I gave her the name, she is Sandy.  I don't know why that is her name but it is. 

So over the weekend I took some time to watch Teesha Moore's  You Tube videos on how to make a 16 page art journal and then the videos that walk you through her process.  You can find all of these videos here.  It was a fun and simple way to make a journal but I wasn't very confident about the collage and drawing part but I thought I would give it a try. 

I did two pages side by side and the one I thought I wouldn't like turned out the best and I ended up ripping up the collage off the other side of the paper because it just didn't work for me.  The issue then was a spent the rest of the day trying to force something onto that page and nothing would work at all.  I finally realized after a couple frustrating hours that I was just trying to hard and I needed to let it go for now and the right idea will come later.  I decided jus to enjoy the picture I had completed that I surprising liked, although she still scares my husband a bit. 

So here she is big eyes and all. 

Here is my princess I think she looks like she is from the renaisance era myself.  I drew her in graphite and then added the color with water soluable oil pastels, which I am really growing to like, and a little bit of white acrylic paint.

I purchased a DVD of Tamara Laporte's online course "Fabulous Faces" off of her Willowing website a couple of months ago.  I loved the short lesson she gave on drawing faces as part of her free "Art, Heart and Healing" course so I wanted to give this more in depth course on faces a try.

When I was showing my mother some of my drawings she asked me why I decided to start my foray into art with faces which are one of the hardest things to draw.  I can't really say except that I find that is what interests me more than anything else.  I keep practicing faces and copying ones I find in books and magazines in an effort to find what I would call "my face" as in the face I most feel like drawing.  I haven't found it yet, I figure in the long run it will likely be a combination of all the different faces I have learned to draw through the many online art classes I am taking.  Yes, I may be becoming an online art class junkie but I do think there are worse habits out there to pick up, and really it is a lot cheaper than the shopping addiction I used to have.

So anyway, back to topic, here is the first face I drew after watching the first weeks video from "Fabulous Faces", she is done entirely in graphite.  I have to say, while the nose is far from perfect, noses continue to challenge me.  Although maybe they challenge me because I let them intimidate me...hmm...food for thought.

I have been working a lot on faces lately.  I am kind of trying to find my face, the one that I want to draw so I am experimenting with a lot of different materials, shapes and styles.

Here are three ladies that I drew the other evening.  They aren't perfect but they are quite different from anything else I have done.