Embellished Mixed Media Collage Portrait

1. Introduction: T Are you looking for new ways to create mixed media artworks? Are you curious about how you can incorporate portraiture into your mixed media art practice? Hi. I'm Elizabeth and welcome to my class embellished mixed Media portraits. I am a professionally trained artist and art educator, as well as a published author illustrator. In 2020, I began teaching for Skillshare, developing classes that explore a wide range of materials, techniques, and art making approaches, as I share my creative journey and artistic processes with my students? I love coming up with new ways to incorporate mixed media art maaking, collage, and different imagery into my artwork? This class, our starting point will be a printed portrait. You can either find online or source from a book. Then we'll be adding different mixed media approaches, techniques, materials to embellish it and really bring that portrait to life. This class is intended for creatives of all skill levels as a fun way to approach mixed media art making with a portrait twist. By the end of this class, you'll have incorporated a printed portrait into a collage, explored the benefits of adding color to black and white images, added a decorative frame to give it a little pup and created a really fun, mixed media, embellished portrait. I hope you enjoy me in class as we create embellished mixed media portraits. B. 2. Class Project: Thanks for joining me. For my class project, I used a printed photo of Frida allows and then explore the idea of mimicking colorization of old photos. Then I added a decorative frame and embellished the portrait and the background with different imagery inspired by Frida's own portraits and her use of bold colors and floor motifs. For this class, you can use any art supplies that you have on hand. But I'll be sharing in the next lesson a list of some of the ones that you might want to consider as you approach the class project. You can either print out your image from the Internet or photocopy it from a book. It's always so fun to see how everyone's class project turns out. After you finish yours, be sure to pop on over to the Projects and Resources section of class and upload photos of your artwork to the student gallery, and be sure to check out the artwork created by your fellow students. The first step is to gather up our art supplies. So let's head on over to the next lesson and take a look at what art supplies you're going to want to have on hand for class. See you soon. 3. Materials: Now let's talk about what art supplies you might want to have on hand for class. Materials for this project are pretty straightforward. I've cut about a nine by six piece of paper. This one is cardstock. You could use mixed Media, watercolor, really any kind of thicker paper would do. Then I've got my portrait that I'm going to be embellishing. I just printed this off on my computer. You could also photocopy it from a book. If you're planning to sell this artwork, you're going to want to make sure that you're using a portrait that is either from a photo that you took or one that you found on a royalty free website, such as unsplash.com. I was doing this for a class that I was teaching about, Mexican artist Frida allo as the project that went with the lecture. I have no plans to sell this, so I was able to just find a photo of Frida on Google images. Be aware if you think at any point, if you're going to possibly sell your work, you want to make sure that you use a royalty free image. Then you're going to want to have scissors for cutting it out and a glue stick. For the mixed media portion of our embellished portraits, you can use any materials that you have on hand. For this one, I'm going to use some oil pestels and some markers. That's it. I'm going to keep it really straightforward. But as you get into this, you might get really inspired and you might decide to get out some more zi pets. Oh, I forgot. We also need to have colored pestils. So I'm going to be using colored pencils to embellish the photo itself and then the photo in the background, I'm going to create between markers and oil pestles. You can use any additional materials that you have on hand, really see what supplies you already have and work with those. Is the best way to do this. We are going to be doing a frame. We're going to also want to have a pencil to map that out, and then a ruler. I'm not going to worry about measuring it too intently, but if you want to be extremely precise, you're absolutely welcome to measure your border around your image. Paper, A copy of a portrait. Scissors, glutick, mixed media materials you want to embellish with, definitely colored pencils are really fundament to use with this project. Pencil, ruler, and that's it. Take some time to gather up your art supplies, and I'll meet you over in the next lesson, where we'll begin creating the collage portion of our portraits and adding our decorative frame. See you soon. 4. Collage: So to do the collage portion, we're going to go ahead and cut out our copied our printed or copied portrait. Then depending on how your portrait is, depend on how you set up your composition. For this one, I want to be able to I know I want to put in a frame, and I know I want to play a little bit with building up the cutoff portion of her hair, and I want to extend her clothing down a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and glue her and to the side a little bit. But look at your own portrait and figure out what's going to work best for the image that you're working with. There's no wrong decision here. It's truly just whatever is aesthetically pleasing to you. So before I glue her down though, I do want to put in my border. I could measure this. I'm just going to eyeball it. I'm not feeling the need to be terribly precise today. But I just want a little bit of a border so that I can have some nice pop of color on the edges and to have it feel a little bit more finish. It also feels more authentic to the portraits that I've chosen to have a border, thinking about Frida Calo's artwork and getting inspired by the image that I chose. You also don't have to have a border. I just think this is a really fun addition to this particular project in this class. I've got my frame. I'm going to go ahead and glue down my portrait. Now I'm ready to move on to the next lesson, where we're going to be adding in the mixed media details. See you there. K. 5. Frame and Portrait Colorization: Now it's time to explore different mixed media techniques, approaches and materials as we embellish our collaged portraits. Now we're ready to start doing the decorative frame on our project. So the first thing that I did was with a ruler, I just kind of marked out how far in I wanted my frame to go. I'm working on a nine by six inch piece of paper. So it's a fairly small artwork, so I wanted kind of a minimal frame with a big impact, but I also wanted to keep it simple. So I'm just kind of going in with some bold marker to fill in color blocks on the different sides of the frame edge. You could add as much intricate detail pattern mark making to your frame as you like. But I knew that I was going to have a lot going on around my figure, so I really wanted to keep a simple yet related boldness to the frame. So now I'm just kind of continuing the portrait because her hair was cut off in the photo. And now I'm doing the colorization. This is a really fun step, and I really love the subtlety of it. You could push your color on the colorizing part of this project as bold as you wanted to go. You could go realistic, you could go you know, non realistic colors, nonrealistic, just really have fun with it. But I wanted to kind of stay true to what the natural colors were in the world and just also the inspiration that this photo drew for me. So I'm just using some basic skin tones to kind of put in a skin tone that is similar to what I've seen in photos of Frida, and kind of working it in very subtly. So just a really just kind of like a hint of color is how I decided to approach this step. And then I'm just continuing to add other pops of color where the photo calls for it and where I want them to go. So some details, making the lips stand out. And then her eyes, kind of giving that a little bit of makeup to make them pop. That's kind of a nod to pop art sort of. And then using the colored pencils to kind of fill in the drawn on sections that I've kind of put in there to extend the image of the figure up past the cutoff point of the portrait. And then this was a really fun part because I started adding in pops of color to clothing. So for this one, depending on the portrait that you chose, you could either kind of just go with whatever you want to do and what feels right for the portrait in this black and white setting, adding in color, or you could go back into some color photos of whoever the portrait is of that you're using to kind of get some inspiration from those or from the time period or the culture. So really kind of take this part of the step anywhere you want it to go and have some fun with it. Once you've added all of the color pencil detail that you want to at this point to your portrait printout, now you can head over to the next lesson to continue adding mixed media details to our project. See you soon. 6. Mixed Media Embellishments: For this step of your project, here is where you can use whatever art supplies you have on hand. I knew that I wanted to kind of have some really loose florals, so I'm going to use oil pestils for that. But I also wanted to carry the boldness of the marker border into the space around Frida. So to get a clean edge to the border, I'm taking the base color that I'm going to use, which is a really dark blue, and I'm just kind of outlining that edge so that I kind of know where to stop, like defining the border edge a little bit. And then I'm going to start working into the open white space around my figure. So I'm going to go ahead and just create some really loose circles. I just want to allude to the idea of flowers. For this point, you can do anything you want to. So what embellishments can you add to your portrait to really kind of add some personalization to it to give it a certain feel. Is there imagery that you really enjoy making? Do you want to do imagery or do you want to go more abstract? There's no right or wrong right here. The important thing is to have fun and find some further ways that you can unify your artwork between the original copied portrait and the frame that you've added, and then whatever other decorative materials are going to go between the two to really finish the piece off. For example, to create my flowers, I wanted to play with bright bold colors that were in the color scheme that I already had established for this piece. I knew I wanted to have s size variety because I really enjoy varying the scale to add some dynamic visual interest. I also knew that I didn't want to get very particular about the types of flowers that I created. I really just wanted essence of floral. I was really kind of playing off of some of the floral head pieces that Frida was donn to wear, and even some of the floral aspects that she worked into her portraits that she painted. So I started going in with my oil pastels, I sit a couple of different bold colors, created some very loose circles, and then I'm just working back into those with a secondary color. So I think each flower was some combination of three colors. So I have kind of a red, red orange, and then I added some pops of lightness. And then for the blues, I started with a dark blue, and then I think I worked some black and some white into them. So just some color variation, but also being very mindful of value variation so that by repeating these circular scribble lines, I could give the essence of a rounded floral shape and just fill the whole background space with that. And then because I'm working really intuitively and just kind of building up on it and constantly kind of assessing, how is it looking? What else does it need? That's when I decided to go in with the yellow. So I wanted to kind of warm up my orangish flowers, and then I want to add some even more variation to the scale, and I wanted some bright pops, too. So I started popping in just little bits of these yellow ones to allude to some smaller yellow flowers just to continue to add some dynamic energy to the piece and just really start kind of bringing it to life and resolving this idea that I had. And at this point, I wanted to add some more of those brightnesses. That's why I decided to go in with the white on my pink flowers to really give those some bright pops so that there was some even greater value variation across the colors that I'm using for my flowers. So as you're working back into your background and trying to unify your piece and kind of embellish it in ways that really speak to you. Consider how you can play with color, value, size, placement. You want to really maintain the focus on your portrait because that's kind of the essence of the piece. So what can you add that's really going to kind of bring that portrait to life? And really create something that's super interesting and dynamic and visually exciting that represents you as an artist, the figure, and the portrait that you're working with, and just where you're at in your creative journey and how you're feeling today. So this is the point where I decided I kind of wanted to go back in with that marker. And I knew I wanted to have that bold purplish, blue violet behind it. So I started just kind of tracing around my floral shapes and then just filling that in with some nice block of color so that there's really some nice unification between the frame and the flowers and the figure, but also just kind of cleans everything up. So anywhere that there was open white space, I started doing this and kind of filling it in to just give it a really crisp finished look because I wanted to have the texture of oil pastels maintained there, but I also wanted to make sure that I could still keep it clean. And from this point on, it was just a matter of continuing those flowers around and kind of mirroring what I'd already done along the top and the edge to finish it up and then adding some more of that blue violet marker to clean up those edges. And like I said, I'm constantly reassessing, reevaluating, and kind of seeing what additional things need to happen. So once I had all of that bold color happening around Frida, I wanted to go back in and pop some of my colored pencil colorization, just a little bit bolder, and then a couple other final touches, and then she was done. I'm so happy with how M turned out. And I've got some ideas for a few more embellished portraits that I plan to make in the future. I can't wait to see what you created. So let's head it over to the final lesson to wrap up the class. 7. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking this class and exploring embellished mixed media portraits with me. I hope you're feeling inspired, and you can see lots of different ways. You can incorporate this approach to mixed media art making into your art practice and even potential future portrait collages, or even any other collage imagery that you would like to work on embellishing and giving those little pops of color and texture and pattern to really bring them to life and put your unique spin on imagery that you find online and in books. Be sure to head on over to the Projects and Resources section of class, click the Create Project button to upload images of your embellished mixed media portrait. You can add text describing the process or the art materials that you used or why you chose the portrait that you did, and even maybe where you found the portrait, to give others ideas of where they can go sourcing portraits to. Don't forget to check out the class projects of other students. Circle back to the class to find out about new projects that have been uploaded as more students discover our class, and to help more students discover our class, consider leaving a review, sharing your thoughts and experiences, what you think went well, I'm really a reflective teacher. I love hearing back from my students about what they enjoyed, areas where I can improve this class, future classes, past classes, and just different ways that they explored the process themselves in their own art making experience. I know as a student, I personally love leaving a review as a chance to reflect on my own learning. What can I take away from the class? How can I incorporate into my art practice and just sharing how it went with others as they consider whether they want to join our embellished mixed media portrait fun. Want to keep learning from me on Skillshare, be sure to click the Follow button so that you get notified as I upload new classes in the future. If you want to continue learning and connecting off Skillshare, be sure to pop on over to my YouTube channel and check that out. I share art techniques, art practices, studio approaches, and take you along on with me for some different art adventures that I go on throughout the year. If you share your artwork over on Instagram, I would love to celebrate your journey over there as well. So be sure to tag me at Elizabeth Underscore Welfare. And I love sharing my students work with my Instagram followers. So if you share your class project in the student gallery, I'll be sure to ask you if it's okay if I share it over on my Instagram as well as I continue to encourage students to join us on their skill share journey and to check out the class. And I'll see you next time.