Merry Christmas - Daily Doodle #2

I hope you all out there in "Internetland" have had a wonderful Christmas day. I had a great time enjoying the day with my family and consuming lots (perhaps way too much) of good food and holiday treats. (I wish you could get Egg Nog all year round. Hands down my favorite treat of the season!)

Anyway, as much as it would have been nice to take the night off, I am committed to doing a daily doodle and sharing with you all that I can about my process. (It also keeps me in check; ensuring I get in some daily practice time.)

Today's design was inspired by a holiday towel my mother had hanging in her bathroom today. As it is Christmas, it made sense to do a doodle that had a holiday theme to it. Below is a picture of the towel design along with my doodle version of it. 

Of course I had to have fun doing a lot more embellishing with my version. Though I obviously substituted some simpler line work on the ribbon rather that incorporating the leaf detail... I would have been up all night and I have my Christmas gift of a box set of Stargate SG-1 to get started on. (Yes, I'm a sci-fi geek... I love the Stargate series among others... and don't even get me started on Star Wars...)

Tonight I used all Mehron paint. It is super creamy and smells oh so yummy (like a tropical coconut scent) - if my sugar tooth was desperate enough, I would almost eat one of the cakes... Uh, not really, but if the cakes were edible, I wouldn't have anything to paint with... seriously... Just give me a big glass of ice cold milk to dunk them in!

I got this mega palette with 26 colors (plus 2 each extra of black and white) as a gift from my awesome boyfriend in November. We had been watching them for a while, but chose to wait until after Halloween to see if the price would drop on it... and it did. (I watched this same palette go from $99 to $140 within a matter of a few days as it got closer to Halloween.) He managed to snag this beauty from Amazon for about $75.. so it was definitely worth waiting until after Halloween. 

As I mentioned, the cakes are super creamy and are great for covering large areas. Though I noticed the pigments do not load onto the brushes as nicely as the Wolfe FX paints do. Thus, I was having to fill my brush much more frequently and use a lot more water to keep the pigment smooth, otherwise it got real clumpy, and rather quickly. Certainly not the best option for dong line work, especially when you're constantly having to reload your brush during more intricate line work, or halfway through a spiraling flourish.

I do have to say I LOVE their metallic gold. It is almost like painting with 14k gold. Very bright, and very metallic. The downside is that it seemed to clump even more than the solid colors, so controlling it took quite a steady hand and a lot of patience with all the back and forth between the pigment and my water cup. 

As this case is more of a sampling of all their most popular colors, the cakes are much smaller than normal sized cakes. But I like it because it offers such a wide variety and the kids love choosing colors from it. (It also lets me know which colors are the most popular so when I do go to purchase larger cakes, I can be more choosy of what colors to get. 

As you can see above, the cakes are a nice size. They are bigger than a quarter and about 1/5" -1/4" thick. A decent amount of paint for a sample size. I would think one could get a few hundred faces out of this palette at least; even more if you solely do small cheek designs or similar. 

The photos also show how I really had to work the gold and green cakes to keep them in the consistencies I needed for them to apply smoothly. As I mentioned earlier, I can see these paints working really well for larger coverage or blocks of color; not necessarily the best choice for line work and precise details.

The size of the palette is pretty nice too. It is just slightly smaller than my Mac laptop which is a 15.3" size. And, the case is great too. I just open the case up, and put my individual cakes, rainbow cakes, and one stroke cakes in the well of the inside cover and I'm ready to go. I do wish the cakes were not adhered to the bottom of the case, however; I like to hold on to cakes when I'm using them as it's more efficient than always going back and forth. Eventually, I'll likely get around to peeling them all off the back cover... and possibly write about it if it's worth mentioning in a future post.

The paints themselves are quite opaque when used, but tend to crack more easily the thicker you put it on. (I would try to avoid a ton of layering with these, unless you're using it more sheerly with a sponge as a background color.) I will do another doodle with this palette... I'm sure of that. I just love the variety of color it offers, and its a great palette for someone like me who is still in the beginning stages of building my business. 

So to all you newbies out there - This palette is well worth shelling out $75 -$100 for. In fact, pick up this palette, a couple of one stroke cakes (The Arty Brush Cakes by Silly Farm are super fun!), some Wolfe FX Black & White, and you'll have an awesome start to your professional palette!

Tonight I left the pigment on my brushes so you could see what brushes I used for which color. I again favored my Royal Majestic brushes from Silly Farm, and I used the Wolfe FX brush from Norcostco that I'm still not too thrilled with, but it did lay the gold on more thick than the other brush I used. The thin black brush is the one I mentioned yesterday that came with my Wolfe palette. It is awesome for doing fine line work and I used it to paint the white into my design today. The last one is a Princeton Art & Brush Co. Adjustable Sliding Grip brush (red rubber & clear handle) that I purchased at Dick Blick. I really like that it has a plastic handle rather than wood, so water doesn't affect it. I had originally purchased this to do some acrylic painting with, but decided to save it for face painting instead. It is another favorite of mine and it's great for doing teardrops and swirls too.

I think that pretty much covers it all for today's edition of my daily doodle. Santa was nice to me today and gave me a Visa gift card, so I'm going to shop for some new paint by other brands to test out in an upcoming edition of my daily doodle. If you have any suggestions for paints to try, please share your thoughts and feedback with me. Also, if I can include any other details in my posts, let me know what you would like to hear. 

As always,

Keep creating, keep smiling, and keep dreaming  & I hope your Christmas was Fantastical!

-tif-

26 December 2014- Update: I chose to keep the paint on for the entire night to see what kind of staining might occur when I washed it off this morning. I was surprised to see that the entire design stayed relatively in tact, a nice thing for kids who want their face paint to last into the next day. Also, it washed off super easy. I had no staining from the red or green, which are two colors that are notorious for staining. I used only liquid soap to wash it off too! I'll be back later today with my next doodle! :)