Embroidered Collage

  Last night I picked up my crayons again for the first time in about a month and drew a gold swoosh, then a couple more, then thought, hmm, that could be hair, but I was apprehensive about my ability to make a person look good.  Then I reminded myself that this was to enjoy myself and to do it anyway.  So I kept going, first with some light sketching, then putting in layers of color, then finally taking a brush and water to the piece. 

I'm glad I pushed past my own reluctance.  I think that the watching and reading and thinking and sketching is starting to sink in that I could do something this good without a reference!  The face definitely has that "amateur" quality to it, but it's further along that I would have anticipated from myself and rather appealing.  It makes me want to do more sketching and practice drawing and keep moving forward.  I had been intending to just trim the portrait down to a 5"x7" size, but a misplaced cut had me shrugging my shoulders and cutting out the image to apply elsewhere.

I then truly did just play with some greens and a more heavily loaded brush to form the abstract.  I will definitely be adding stitching or some such to this piece before I consider it done but at least I trimmed it to size properly as a start.