Bad Celebrity Impersonators

So I have been working this week on a small project. After being inspired by some beautiful paintings by one of my favourite artists on Deviant Art, Lily-Fox. Hers of course are a million times more wonderful than anything i have been able to do yet but it was fun to try.




This journal is supposed to be of bettie page, whom I love. I'm making it for a sister of mine who actually looks a lot like bettie page herself! Lucky! Anyway as you can see it doesn't really look like either of them XD unfortunately. I think if I had just been trying to do a picture of a girl from the 50's then i could be pretty happy with it but i kind of missed the mark on this one. Still, it's better than the plain old cover right?

I'm probably going to finish this with a light varnish but i want to try it out on something else first so that it doesn't get ruined.

The next one is supposed to be mr. Presley himself and once again I find that it looks more like a bad celebrity impersonator than the King himself. Actually at first it was looking like my Elvis was starting to look like *shudders* someone out of a twilight movie. I restrained myself from burning it and decided to just try my best to fill the rest with enough references that people would know who he was. I gotta say I love that red acrylic ink. It's magic. I love that true red colour. It's just so applealing to my eyes.

I have one left to finish and i'll post it when i'm finished.



**The small journals that I have used are by Moleskine and have cardboard covers. The come in packs of 3 which is perfect for what I have in mind. They are 3.5 X 5.5. I used a mix of pigma waterproof markers for the black outline. The white area is Acryla Gouache and it's the one of the first times I have used it. It's not as opaque as I would have liked and I had to use a lot of it to get good coverage but i love how mat and chalky it looks. I used FW acrylic inks for the black, red and blue bits. I'm not usually an acrylics person but I LOVE the inks. I love how they flow and the coverage is awesome. One thing that I wish I had known before using them on the cardboard cover is that they tend to bleed out a bit. I prefer a crisp edge. It's hard to see but there is gold acrylic in this as well on the stars, crown and accents. It's a crappy old craft acrylic heavy body paint that's been kicking around my art drawer forever and still manages to come out every now and then. I might consider doing gold leaf in the future. Ooh and some of the shading-there isn't much as it didn't work too well-was done with water soluble graphite.**