Faerie Enchantment

Mixed Media Clay Painting: LuLu's Carnival!
I've always loved illustration and experimenting with different art supplies to create an illustration, in my children's book:"Star and the Milky Way Cafe" I choose to use prismacolor pencils and markers, since it was for children, I wanted children to relate to it, as if they were coloring the images in.

As I started switching back and forth from illustration, writing, publishing and collage, I found myself combining a variety of materials to finish pieces, finding I had a love affair with Altered Art and Mixed Media Illustration, yet I found myself doing other things, creating artful projects, with less attention to what I started out to do: Illustration.

I've been experimenting with various clay recipes that I have been making from a variety of materials, until I finally found one that can work as a bisque paper clay, mixed with paints, air drying and watered down to form a paste which can be adhered to canvas, 3-D sculpted and turned into what I call Clay Paint!This is the first 10 stages in my new mixed media clay painting called: LuLu's CarnivalIn these first 2 photo's you can see the beginning stages of the piece, where I layered old book print onto canvas with my fave Modge Podge, then drew a Charlotte/Carnival Doll image onto it with a Crayola Pencil ( I am a Crayola Supply Addict, love their products and use in many of my works, including items in my new book: Altered Art Circus). Filling in the background and image with acrylic paints, mixed with Claudine's Paints (Ranger Ink). Then certain parts are layered with my clay paint mixture and a charlotte doll head from my doll parts line.Here in this 3rd picture is an upclose detail of LuLu's Clay skirt.Now I draw in the extra illustrative details of LuLu's Face which you can see here in the 4th photo!In this 5th photo I have outlined LuLu with a deep pink glitter gel pen and began painting in the face and and her clay dress.In these 3 photo's above show the different painting details! Here is the fully painted LuLu, but she is missing a Carnival hat, balloon and carnival tent curtains, which I have drawn in and painted in which you can see in these next 2 photos!There are a few more details which have to be added to this painting in order to bring it really to life such as more gel pen outlining, dimension to the background through extra textures, I love Crayola Texture Paint, its great priced and can last a while. When mixed with paints or other mediums, you can get interesting results. I will also be adding petal porcelain to coat my piece, again this is another fave medium of mine, followed by glitter and beeswax, which I melt in my beloved Melting Pot (Suze Weinberg-Ranger), followed by a crayon and beeswax mix. These photos of the finished piece will be up tommorrow. I have a full journal of these images in them which I will get photographed as well.

Learn Mixed Media Clay Painting in my workshop of the same name where you leave with a medium to large sized canvas art piece and a new way of painting!
Here is an image of my hand molded/ hand made doll heads. I molded one for this piece for LuLu's hair barrett.