I was in Phoenix from January 17th to the 25th, at CHA.  Phoenix is the desert.  Sunny and dry, right?

Uh, not so much.  Not when one is married to a human black cloud.  It was overcast and miserable for about 60% of the time and the city had record rainfall one of the days, courtesy of my husband, the man who brings rain to the desert.  The little sun we did see was glorious after months of winter in New England; a reminder that the sun does shine. (when Dave is not around.  I digress)

While enjoying the sun warming my face it occurred to me that “Here Comes The Sun” would be a good prompt for Week 5, and so here we are.  My sun not only warms your face, it also includes one.  The face-phobic out there need not stress.  You can either leave yours without one or use The Fearless Face Stencil System if you want a little help.  Or perhaps the lyrics to the Beatles song will inspire your page this week.  Interpret the prompt in whatever fashion your muse dictates.

I started by sketching half a face on the left side of the page.  And immediately got off on the wrong foot, forgetting to leave room for the Media Tape that will bind this page to the previous one.  Doh!  I’ll work around it by not coloring the tape which will permit the viewer to see through to what’s underneath.

I knew I wanted text of some sort, so I also penciled in wavy base lines.

Then I lined everything with a black PITT Fine tip pen.

I chose to color my sun using Dylusions Ink Sprays, Color Wash Sprays, and Distress Spray Stains loaded into Tim’s Detail Waterbrushes.  It’s a convenient and easy way to get watercolor-like effects.  For a nice blend, the key is to work wet on wet.  I worked on one ray at a time and laid in the lightest color first.

The stroke on some of the darker color, concentrating it where you want that one to be predominant.  Still working wet on wet…

Then use the brush with the lighter color to blend the two until you’re satisfied.

Rinse, repeat till all of the rays are done.

Then do the face itself.  Looks a little freaky with the features left white, right?

But gets much better once they’re colored too.

I decided to doodle in the rays and that the pen lines I used on the entire sun were too thin, so I went over them with a Pebeo decoMarker in black, the .7 tip size. I’m liking this now, though am at a loss about what text or quote to use.

I found one by Walt Whitman and penciled it in.

Then I though about filling in some of the wider areas with doodles.  And quickly decided I didn’t like it.

So I removed them and then lined the text.  You can see that I use the penciled text as a guide rather than writing directly over what was there.  When the text was set I erased all of the penciled stuff.

I like this but felt as though the white background was too strong and in your face, so I decided to add color to the text area.

Same process as coloring the sun with the addition of embellishing the text a bit.

Getting there, but… I’m not convinced this is what I saw in my mind’s eye when I imagined the color stripes.

But I just had to go with it since at this point there was no turning back.  The blotchiness doesn’t help, but I was running out of time, so I didn’t rework the colors to try and smooth them out.

And finished is better than not!