Katherine

Yesterday, I took Karen Michel's Mixed-Media Portrait class ... and wow ... did I love that class or what? I have no formal art training and did not even take art in high school. People portraits have always terrified me ... even drawing. I have no real concept of how to draw, shade, or make things look dimensional.

Karen showed us how to take photos, color copies, or magazine pages and give them a hand-painted look. The photos I did were famous people, but I would like to do more of these with some less-known faces ... and go for more of a fantasy look.

Karen is so good at this. She can make the picture all her own ... and even showed us an exercise where she pieces multiple portions of faces together and reworks it to make an illustrative type painting with a lot of personality. I really hope she comes out again ... I just loved her class!

Katherine is far from perfect. I had gluing issues. I got a couple wrinkles in my background papers and Katherine has quite a few as well. I managed to get her painted, but the photo still reveals some of the wrinkles ... and the painting in real life looks a bit more impressionistic than it appears in the photo.