Wednesday WrapUp Portraits and Retreat

Welcome!

On most Wednesdays, check this blog for a strategy, process, or reflection for illustration with the iPad app ProCreate or Affinity Designer. This Wednesday Wrap Up shares a busy week for art — a Portrait Party with Charly Clements and a Summer Creative Retreat by Peggy Dean at The Pigeon Letters.

Portrait Party

Charly Clements is once again sharing a “Fun with Faces” challenge she now calls “Portrait Party.” Draw portraits every day for a week, each day with three items to include.

I’ve completed the all seven portraits, plus some planning with sketches and thumbnails. I mostly use Charly’s brushes, but also some of my own, native Procreate brushes, and some from Lisa Bardot. Here’s the wrapup:

• Portrait Party Time — sketches and thumbnails
• Braids, Watermelon, Jewelry
• Teal, Disco, Afro
• Botanical, White hair, Animal
• Travel, Wavy Hair, Pattern
• Abstract, Long Hair, Reptile
• Sunshine, Glasses, Movement
• Garden, Red Hair, Sparkles
• All my Fun With Faces and Portrait Party faces: TAG

I really leaned to the stylized, round faced portraits this time, mostly because I was busy with other projects. But every time I complete the challenge, I feel like I’m getting better — this time with my own style of eye and nose, drawing a pretty good mouth, a adding highlights to the hair, which I didn’t do in my favorite one for the week:

Summer Creative Retreat

Last Thursday I started Peggy Dean’s Summer Creative Retreat, a six day all day event of artists sharing their thing while we watch and follow along. The Retreat closed on Tuesday, but I have the “Permanent Vacation Pass” so I can rewatch the lessons I’ve missed.

See my previous posts. Check out the artists and their styles:

• Thursday: IG Stickers, Self-Portraits, Drop Patterns and more
• Friday: Painterly style, watercolor, symmetry, zendoodles
• Sunday: Ink Cottages, Calligraphy Flourishes, Painting Glass, bubble letters, and mindfulness

And this week:

Watercolor Floatie

This fantastic watercolor artist taught us how to watercolor glass.
Mako of Makoccino is a traditional watercolor artist, so I followed along on my iPad with Lisa Bardot’s Watercolor Wonders brush set for Procreate. We painted floaties in the pool. My “blobs” are not close enough and they need to be softer. But it did turn out:

Potted Plants and Cats

Terry Runyan [terryrunyan.com] shared her process of painting her wonderful cats with paper cutouts for vases. I completed the process with Lisa’s brushes and Jennifer Nichols micron pen in Procreate “cutouts.” It was a fun time with her cat, her drawn cats, and our own. Now isn’t this fun and so typical of cats:

Dancing House Plants

Genna Blackburn [website] taught us how to animate cute little house plants we drew in Procreate. Now isn’t this cute?

So I decided to also animate the cats:

Challenge Art

During the retreat, challenges were presented. This was fun. Participants called out colors, mediums, and motifs, and we all found the medium we had around us and created the prompt, all of them together on one page. I did mine in Procreate, of course. Some of the the motifs were box, flower, fish, taco, house, spaceship. Mediums were watercolor, marker, ink, metal. I just followed along the best I coule.

Ink and Watercolor

Peggy Dean taught the last class: watercolor and ink vases and flowers. This was relaxing and filled with tips. I continued with Lisa and Jen’s brushes and pens and created this piece, which I like very much.

That’s a Wrap!

Portrait Party with Charly Clements is one of my favorite challenges– be sure to check her IG for the next challenge.

And Summer Creative Retreat? I loved Peggy Dean’s Summer Creative Retreat. I could pick and choose which classes to watch that teach about Procreate and other mediums. What a great summer vacation! Six days of great artist interaction and sharing while creating together with participants from 85 different countries! It’s a small world, and we can learn, laugh, and make art together everyday for six days. Sign up to get news of the next event: Peggy Dean Events.