Goodbye comfort zone

Today I did my first real exercise for Deb Weiers's class, "Wonky Friends and Critters." At moments I looked back with nostalgia to three weeks ago, when I thought I was leaving my comfort zone by drawing with a brush-tipped pen instead of my Uniball for the "Draw with Me" sixpacks! As Joey said to Chandler when Chandler kissed his girlfriend:

Deb is a genius of imagination, and my effort pales next to her original creations, but this is so far over that line for me that I'm gonna say we're in a whole new country. I bought a bunch of new materials and tools—India ink, acrylic inks, gesso, gel pens—and applied them to paper in ways I have never tried before. I really had to screw up my courage at each step: What if I ruin it? What if I hate it? But Deb takes a pretty casual attitude to most of that, saying "Oh, just gesso over it and do it again!" As more of a "purist" watercolorist up until now, I'm not used to being able to use white so freely, but it definitely comes in handy at moments.

This was a blind contour drawing, which is to say that you look at your reference photo and draw without ever looking down at your paper. It results in things like eyes at two different levels, crooked noses,  mouths that sometimes end up over by an ear. I actually did pretty well in terms of locating my features on this one, and I don't know if that pleases or disappoints me, because weird placement is part of the fun.

I started out drawing way too big for the piece of paper, so I worked out to the edges and didn't have room for a border or even for some writing (which Deb adds to most of her pictures). Next time. But here is my "Portrait of Lisa," Weiers-style.

Pencil, Uniball, Daler-Rowney Acrylic Inks, India ink, white gesso, gel pens, watercolor (lips only), on 140-lb. Fluid watercolor paper.