"Listen Within"

I'm trying to focus more on myself. I discovered the practice of mindfulness as a way to help combat my anxiety and while it can be hit and miss for me, I know that I'll never get better at it if I don't try. Pretty much everything in life is that way. I ended up working a bit of mindfulness into my art journal.

Something else that I've been working on is faces. A few months ago, I was sketching and coloring a face at least once a week. Then something happened. I stopped doing faces and took a break. My first face in quite a few months is the purpose of this blog post.

It started out rough. The background is craft paint over stenciled gesso. A second stencil is visible above the first layer with Apple Barrel's "Too Blue." Then we come to the face. I started out by sketching the shape of the face. I added the neck after that and I have to admit that this guy's neck looks way too thick.

I used a black Stabilo All pencil to outline the face, facial details, and the neck. I love how this pencil blends in with paint when Dina Wakley uses it and I attempted to mimic her technique.

This is how the face looked with the second layer of paint (slightly lighter than the first). I still struggle with highlights and shadows and the Stabilo All pencil kind of helps you fake it. Still, it's far from perfect. I was going to go over it a third time but I decided that even though it has imperfections, there's something simplistic and calming about it.

This is the final result of the page.

Other than the baby blue stenciled dots, not much changed to the face. I rebuilt the structure of the chin with the Stabilo All pencil and avoided going back into the facial details because I like how they look. Is it perfect? No. Am I happy with it. Absolutely.