journal spread
Originally uploaded by maryfreeman

Love this image, and it's in an oddly sized journal.

Pretty Soon
Originally uploaded by Ms. Natty

love the frame on this one.

The work is what counts
Originally uploaded by pageofbats

HOLY CRAP I love this person's work. Head over to their flickr page and look at everything, so very awesome.

11 may 10 "normal"
Originally uploaded by fred's "scratchings"

Lovely sketchbook page on flickr. Love the use of line in this one.

journal pages 69 – 70
Originally uploaded by this chicken

Love this person's journal on flickr. Been ogling their stream and you should head over to flickr to do so too.

Check out this video of the making of a nice little AJ Page, by one of my favorite you tubers MarizaTeria

I get a lot of questions about faces and how to shade them what colors to use, wher are the darkest areas etc. I've got plans to do a video, but I suspect that my weird and kind of realistic style is not what people are looking for. I found this 2 part video by YouTuber MyCreativeBliss that details shading and coloring one of those faces with overly large eyes. She uses several shades of peach, cream and ochres to color the face and then Glazing medium to blend and melt the colored pencils together. It's an interesting technique that I'm going to have to test out, not on a big eyed girl face but somethign a little darker and creepy, because I'm like that. Anyway check out these 2 videos, if you are interested in big eyed girls you'll like them.

Part 1:

Part 2

Trial by Fire
Originally uploaded by lessherger

In this image I'm working on 140lb Stonehenge fawn colored paper. It's very absorbent and nice for a lot of acrylic work. It's very sturdy. I sealed the page with gesso.

After I sealed the page and it had fully dried I lightly sanded it smooth with an extra fine sanding block. I then used a stencil of flames and layered it over itself several times to get the flames. I used yellow, orange and red to give the flames some shape and interest. After I had stenciled that I dried the image with my heat gun. After that was fully dry I mixed some blue paint with gloss gell medium and mixed it well on my palette. Using a coarse brush I put in several layers of the blue around the fireball. I left a lot of brush strokes visible purposefully. Brush strokes add a little more interest to the image.

After the blue dried fully I mixed some burnt sienna with some glaze medium and brushed that around the fire ball to darken the edges. I used a soft rag to blend the paint into the edges of the fire ball.

After that was dry I was considering the image of the fire. It was off somehow.So I decided to add some black outline to it. Using an Elmer's paint pen, in extra fine black I quickly doodled in some flame detail.

After everything had dried I added the lettering in white Elmer's paint pen with a calligraphy tip.

Originally uploaded by ms. stephanie brown

Love everything this lady does, in this image a woman eats cherries. Slightly creepy but very cool.

Hands, Faces
Originally uploaded by robobop

I had friends in college who used to fill their sketchbooks like this. Me I preferred to work on clean pages, how could I tell what went with which sketch? Or is that the point?