Portrait-topia

 

Eleven of us (plus Wendie) just spent the past 2.5 days immersed in a portrait class with Wendie Scott Davis.  We are exhaustipated, but exhilarated!  This was a difficult class, for even the simplest of portraits, and some of our number chose real whoppers to work on!

We learned more about value and flesh tones than we would have thought possible.  We also learned about techno bits to make some of the work a titch easier….and Wendie has supplied us with tons of notes and tutorials.  We even had a wee bit of fun…..

We started out with transferring our patterns using sublimation markers - a fabulous process - very easy to do if you have the right markers (we used ready-made ones from amazon or Michael’s).  Here’s a link to the Ottawa Old Forge Rug Hookers instructions on the transfer, using a refillable marker. (btw, their instructions for beginners page contains a whack of great info!)

And then we started in on the hooking part…..

After the first half day we were a tad overwhelmed and wondering what the heck we had gotten into….but we arrived the next day ready to jump in.

You start with the eyes….and this is where all of our portraits looked like zombies for a few hours.

Eventually we moved on to mouths, and teeth for some….now we had folks with chiclets for teeth….

After the 2nd day, we left feeling exhausted and drained - those portraits are hard work!

We were ready to get going by the 3rd day.  Everyone worked at their own pace - and some had almost completed portraits at the end, others have a tad more work to do….but by the end of it all, i think we were on a bit of high - we accomplished a LOT and have some really fantastic portraits underway.  Here are just a few examples.

A huge thank you goes to Wendie for guiding us along this journey - she pushed and cajoled and kept us entertained.  Her creativity is off the scale!  Her hard work allowed us to produce some amazing works.

For those interested in some true eye candy (and for the students who want to study how she did some of these things), here are photos of the works she brought along to inspire us. (For scale - many of these are 8x8-ish!)