Art Journal Monday November 14 - Blockhead days

This week's Art Journal challenge was to use squares in our piece. Hhhmmm Squares - blocks - well as soon as you see my entry you will know what kind of a day I had.

Do you have days like that? You know, days when your brain is in low gear and sometimes even stalls? This background was created a couple of weeks ago and I HATED it and tossed it aside. Then I took Linda Heaven's mixed media course at the Paper Pickle and found out how to change a background simply by using gesso. So, some gesso, some squirts of ink over square stencils, some stamping of tiny squares and I had a new background that I could live with.

Then I just hand cut out the shirt, pants, shoes and arms out of left over scrapbooking paper. Notice the zig zag stripes on the shirt? I did that because I kept hearing Lucy saying "Your're such a blockhead Charlie Brown" in my head so I had to add the stripes for poor old Chalie Brown. I had bought a huge bag of wood shapes at one of the thrift stores ages ago and once in awhile I pull them out and use them. I picked the square, painted it flesh coloured and then painted on the face - quickly - not bothering with a lot of shading and highlighting - was not up to that on a blockhead day! The hair is from a package of doll hair I have and I just glued it on with Tacky Glue. The lettering was printed out on the computer, glued on and then I brushed water over some of the paint to bleed it into the lettering so it wasn't so stark. I used raw umber acrylic paint to shade in around the figure. Done!