Pencil

Friendly Faces Day 30

| Gina Lento

Today’s prompt is sleepy eyes. I felt like going rogue today and not use a reference for my character. I just plopped gouache on the paper and started making a head shape and I sketched features with pencil. Slowly a winter elf emerged. I added the snowflakes at the end. I was thinking of the peace and stillness I felt when there was a gentle snowfall and just standing there, taking it in. You could hear the flakes hitting leaves and autumn debris. A lot of times, major snowstorms would start quietly, with just gentle flakes. Snow didn’t come in like a thunderstorm. Many times snowflakes came in slowly, subtly and then they brought friends; more snow and wind.

So this elf is standing outside, taking in the peace of the quietly falling snow.

Friendly Faces #3

| Gina Lento

Here is my third Friendly Faces sketch. The idea of this challenge is to create characters and I wanted to use gouache for this so these are starting out leaning towards portraits but I know how they’ll look as the challenge goes on, lol. They’ll be characters all right. Lol.

This is in my homemade sketchbook made with Stonehenge paper, using gouache and watercolor pencils.

Friendly Faces

| Gina Lento

I am doing the 50 Friendly Faces Challenge. This is actually Day 2 and I found out about it today so I’ll double back on the end to do Day 1.

Today was mustaches…I am using this challenge to practice my gouache skills. This image from my sketchbook has not been digitally touched up.

Firefly Two Page Spread

| Gina Lento

Here is a two page spread from the Firefly story by Zoë Tucker. I started to do the whole spread in color but I really liked the black and white sketch that I did, especially after I blew it up to actual book size. I tweaked the sketch to a final drawing and added the firefly and some creatures and this is my mixed color and B&W version.

I will probably finish the color version another time…..

Firefly Again

| Gina Lento

This past week was Poses week. I revamped my character again. I actually like trying different things to see what works. Different approaches, different color palettes. Shake things up a bit. This course is for portfolio building so why not push things harder to see where I can go with it?

The color palette for this group was picked by my 4 year old grandson. I emailed the family and I did the girls’ choice last week. This week it was CJ’s turn. The glasses last week were Julian’s when he used to wear them.

All 5 of these fireflies were done in my Soul Journal that John bought for me as a Mother’s Day gift, several years ago, from Innovative Journaling. It’s a leather journal that is refillable. I can put two refills in it which means I can put two different types of paper in there. It’s 5.5 x 8.5 which is a nice size to work on.

I did all 5 on their own page. The paper is Arches text wove and it handles wet media nicely. I’ve used watercolor and acrylic on this paper as well.

Lil’ Easter Bunny

| Gina Lento

It’s April and Easter is only a few days away so I am starting off the month with a few Easter critters. I had several blob creatures that looked like bunnies and this is one of them. I am working in a sketchbook that is made from a leather cover with Arches Text Wove paper which is very soft and is very nice to work with water media.

The sketchbook came as a kit that I purchased from https://innovativejournaling.com I bound it myself.

Marty loves Easter and wants to be the Easter Bunny when he grows up. He dreams about being the Easter Bunny all the time.