Suzanne Russell Art

  • Bitch

    Bitch

    I have seen various opinions on the difference between and art journal and a sketchbook, and fundamentally I don’t know if there is much of a difference, but for the sake of better quantifying my vast pile of books-in-progress, this is in my art journal. I am not well-practised in lettering, as you can see,…

  • Messy Art Therapy

    Messy Art Therapy

    A lot of people I know are terrified, in a much worse way than I am, and it’s hard. To top it off, someone I had a lot of time for treated me very poorly today, and it felt like a gut punch. Some late in the day mixed media art therapy on my large…

  • Looking Down Her Badly Drawn Nose

    Looking Down Her Badly Drawn Nose

    Struggling with noses today, perhaps it’s because everything got a bit smelly in the world. ugh Til the morn, Suzanne 339/400

  • Keep Going

    Keep Going

    I did not break my streak despite the overbearing sense of doom. Til the morn, Suzanne 338/400

  • Quick Draw

    Quick Draw

    We had visitors all day today, so there was very little time for art. I managed a quick play in my junk journal drawing a face with my non-dominant hand in a continuous line. I had enough time to do a few bits with paint, and then the dog visitor arrived. There were humans too,…

  • Mixing Blacks

    Mixing Blacks

    When I am painting I really try to focus on value, and I have mentioned before different ways of analysing values as I am working. My favourite way is using my small rectangle of red perspex to view my painting as I am working. It’s simple, and instant. Once I started focusing on values, and…

  • Big Paper Messy Play and Discoveries

    Big Paper Messy Play and Discoveries

    This is a very large sheet of paper, so large that it’s really too large for either of my studio benches. It’s from the pack of Snowdon paper I bought with a gift voucher, and I am having a lot of messy fun. There’s acrylic ink, paint, gesso, art markers, collage, some of those punched…

  • The Vivienne Tribute Portrait

    The Vivienne Tribute Portrait

    I have a list of people that I am interested in painting, and when I added The Vivienne to that list I did not imagine for one second that I would be painting them following their death. RIP queen, 32 is far too young to have left us. I think I have finished my tribute…

  • Back to the Glam

    Back to the Glam

    Resting the portrait was slowly morphing into avoiding the portrait which risks slowly morphing into not finishing the portrait, so I had a quiet word with myself and squeezed some paint on the palette. I have changed the eyes and the jawline, done more work on the lips and nose, and I am much, much…

  • Priming Papers

    Priming Papers

    I’m still resting that portrait, not least because I did not sleep well at all last night, for a number of reasons. For today’s creativity I watched this week’s Let’s Face It class with Deanna Strachan-Wilson. I like her process, and I spent a bit of time pondering how to respond to the class in…

  • Painting Tools and Collage Fodder

    Painting Tools and Collage Fodder

    I ended up with only a short amount of time for art today, and I decided I wanted to give my portrait a rest, and have some space from it, before going in to hopefully finish. Instead I did some simple play in my old sketchbook, not really trying to create anything, just moving paint…

  • Making Fake Believable

    Making Fake Believable

    Today was all about the hair, and a few tweaks to the lips and eyes, but I wasn’t in the mood for doing much to the face. I think what’s left to do to the face needs to happen at the end, once all the colours everywhere else are in place. This is a really…