I love making portraits of my family, especially when I play with fun backgrounds. This course was a bit different.
First published January 27, 2024: This week I played with three new (to me) tools — the gelli plate, image transfers and acrylic flow medium. I had to actually purchase the gelli plate and flow medium, so my post is a bit late. But while waiting for my supplies, I practiced a portrait using a monoprint I had made from a previous online class. So you will see two projects from me.
This week’s tutorial came from Froyle Davies, a mixed media artist. You can see her work at FroyleArt and her classes are taught through SkillShare. Her site says she has fifteen classes there. The class I took was called “Create a Portrait Painting with No Drawing.” I was intrigued by the idea of such a beautiful portrait as the one she shows without drawing anything.
Which brings me to my first new adventure — executing image transfers. Froyle walks the student through the process of using a copy of a person as a kind of sketch using the gelli plate. I don’t want to steal her thunder, although there are other artists out there using this method. This was my first opportunity to watch the process firsthand, and I learned a lot. Froyle has a great delivery (with her delicious New Zealand accent) and is very encouraging about all of her techniques, making sure the student doesn’t feel overwhelmed. She uses stencils and acrylic ink flows to create a beautiful background for her portrait.
When I got my gelli plate and attempted to make the image transfer, it did not work. (I hear that others have had this issue, but I am sure it is “operator error,” and has nothing to do with the value of Froyle’s class.)
So here is my project, using a monoprint a created in a previous class.
I used one of my favorite stencils (I like to support StencilGirl stencils, since they are made by artists) for her hair. I am not thrilled with the ink flow, but again, this is more my execution. Froyle did a great job of explaining each step.
When my gelli plate arrived, I tried yet again to get an image transfer, to no avail. So I messed with the exposure of the photo on my phone, then printed it out and used that as my portrait base. It is a photo of my granddaughter when she was about 4 yrs old. She loves pink so I used shades of pink in my ink flow, and painted over the stenciled flowers at the bottom, also. I learned alot about process and execution in this lesson. Here is the outcome:
This was a great experience for me. I used some new tools and with some practice, I may continue to use them in future portraits. Thank you, Froyle, for this valuable lesson!
Happy Artventures this week!
P.S. It should be said here, that as far as I can tell, Froyle’s classes are only available through SkillShare. For those of you who have not used SkillShare, it is a subscription service to thousands of classes on a variety of topics — from Art to Business Productivity. I joined it for a year for $99 to see how it works and whether it is worth it. So far this year, I have taken two classes and enjoyed them both.