Here's one of the doll heads that I made in Patti Culea's faces class this past Monday. Wow, Patti's such a great teacher! I was able to improve how I approach drawing faces with just a few extra circles in the preliminary grid work. The above face was made using Micron pens and Prisma Colored pencils - that's it! The trick was to blend in the colors using a piece of scrap fabric. There's just a bit of sculpting to the nose to give it added dimension. Next we learned how to attach fake eyelashes and a separate upper eyelid. (If you click on the picture you'll be able to see this detail more clearly.) And if you're wondering, the above head came from her Radical Rachel pattern - the same one that I've made in the past, shown here.
This head is a flat pancake construction using the Micron pens again, but this time with watercolor pencils. I may have been a bit too aggressive with my shadowing. It does show where to place them, but next time I think that I'll try to be more soft. The regular colored pencils are my favorite, but the watercolor pencils do make a more dramatic blush. No one says that you can't blend the two media. Oh, and finally Patti suggests using Createx Textile Medium to protect the faces.
Patti brought in many of her dolls that she's featured in her three books. You think that the dolls are amazing from the photographs, but to see and touch them in person was a different story. The colors are vibrant and the textile manipulation and beading are fabulous. What a treat to see. Lots of inspiration and motivation to complete more doll projects.
The class was such a fun experience that I'd highly recommend it to anyone who wants to improve their face drawing skills. And I was such a dweeb that I brought in my copy of Patti's book, Creative Cloth Doll Faces, and asked her to sign it for me. She was so sweet and complied. So I guess that makes me a doll groupie now?
