 Hey guys, we are here for another episode of the Four Faces Journal. So we are going to do a quick review of what we've done so far in here. We did this one. All pen work. This one, all pen work, but water-soluble pen, so we added a little water. This one, which was pen over paint, basically. And then this one, which used crayons and markers and some things with some paint. So this time we're going to do something new. I'm going to put our little hard sheet in between to protect the next page and also again to give us something firm to work on and push against. I'm going to use a binder clip or one of these little, I have a lot of these around the art room, these to hold the pages open. We call it the Four Faces Journal for those who are new because it is using a journal creating faces different ways using this stencil I've created as a guide for doing just that. This stencil has four faces on it, four basic face shapes, no hair, not a lot of features, just really just the basics to give you a guide. That's all it's intended to be as a guide. It is four in one to give you more options, but also if you're working in a smaller journal, which I is my preferred way to work, this is the perfect size for that and you can leave it as is and use them on a stencil all together like this, or they've been spaced in a way that you can cut them apart, which we've done here. So we are going to do another face today and to start with we are going to put this aside and I'm going to get this piece of mail. I ordered something. What did I order? Washi tapes it says from Japan, some stationery from Japan, and it came in this envelope to my old PO box. I don't live in California anymore and I saved this because I thought it was interesting, which it is. So we're going to use part of it to create our face today. I think I'm going to use this green customs label. I think I want to go back to using the square face. I'm going to lay it on the customs label and yeah, I think I think I'm going to cut the whole label out because I think I'm going to want to use the whole label. Let's get some scissors. I'm not going to go too far with this envelope, piece of the envelope, because I think there's some other elements on here I might want to cut out. But we'll see. So we'll put that aside. Okay, now you could just trace your face guide on here and then glue it to your page or you could cut it out. I'm still debating about what I want to do. Well, let's get it traced on here regardless. Let's just center our face shape here and we're going to use a pencil. This is just... This is actually from a cruise I took. You know, it's from probably the bingo table or something. I have a few of these from Ikea. But it's just basically a basic number two pencil and I'm going to use it to trace our guide on our piece of paper. I'm going to trace all the shapes like that. Can you see that? I don't know. Can you see that on there? Oops, shaky camera. Sorry. Okay. So then the question becomes... Now that we've got that on there. Do I want to use this as a whole or don't want to cut it out? Because you totally, now that you have the basic shape on there of the face, you totally could cut or tear this out and maybe I want to tear it. You know, I'm really, I'm really tempted to just leave it whole. I think I'm going to go with my first instinct here, which wasn't what I was intending. But let's do that. We are going to get out some tacky glue and glue this to our page. I was going to go a different direction with this, but I guess I'm not going to. My muse is telling me not to. We'll try to do it on the next one. All right. So I'm going to put this down. I'm also going to give it a little wiggle and try to spread some of that glue out on the bottom. Between the two pieces of paper. And then I'm going to take an old gift card or hotel room key. Push it down. There's some corners sticking up. So I really want them stuck down well. So we're going to put some more glue up there. And we'll do the same thing to the bottom because it's sticking up a little bit down here. That'll work. Now, we need to bring out our face. Somehow, before we put anything else on here, I need, I need to make it stand out from the background of this shipping, this customs label. I'm going to use black. It's kind of been my go-to color so far. But the question becomes, do I want to use my standard black ballpoint? Do I want to use a black paint pen? Do I want to use something else? Oh, there's black. So, test paper. All right. So here is a black paint pen I have laying around. It needs mixing. It's not bad. I also have my favorite big crystal pen. It does come in a broad tip. So this is the regular big pen. That's the size of line work you get with it. This is the broad, which is darker and thicker, a darker and thicker line. We may just want to use the broad pen and then I might want to highlight with a paint pen. So let's give that a try. It's much like sewing and other creative endeavors. If you start out with less, you can always add more. With sewing, if you start off bigger, you can always make it smaller, right? But you can't really go backwards. So it's hard to make something smaller bigger. It's also hard to make something that you've already put down there in ink in a big, bold line, make it thinner. It's easier to start out a little thinner. Get my drifter. Was that confusing? Okay. So we are going to use our black pen here to create our shape. I'm lifting the pen up a bit, but not too much. I like the messy look on my faces. She didn't know that already. If you haven't been following me long or you're new to the channel, I'm not really a big fan of realism. It's not really my bag. I like messy, expressive, sort of abstracted work. That's my thing. It's my jam. And the guide is intended to help you express who you are and what you're feeling with your faces, but to do it in a way that it still looks like a face. All right. Do I want to put any marks for the hair? Because I have some other idea. Yeah, let's put a few marks, but not too many because I have some other ideas. Okay. We're going to take our black paint pen now, which is probably almost empty, and I haven't used in a while. Let's use it to just make a few darker places. I'm barely, barely, barely touching the pen to the paper. Oh, we're going to give this a dry and I'll be right back. Okay. So you have your interesting background. I ran a piece of paper and it could be a piece of newspaper. It could be like this, a piece of an envelope, a magazine page, a sheet music, anything. You've created your face on top of it in an abstract, messy, interesting way. This could be done. You could be done with it this way, do a little journaling around it or something. She's cute, but we all have stickers around in our art room. Some of us from the scrapbooking days. I also have stickers in my Etsy shop. So let's use a combination of these to add to her and add some hair to her. So I want to sort of, the idea is to do something like that. And I've got all these sort of sticker flakes. I think that's what the current term is. And the black paint pen, the black pen and the black paint pen will show through these because these are sort of a vellum sticker. Whereas these are printed on white paper, so it covers up whatever's underneath it. But at the same time, they're going to sort of highlight or accent hopefully what's already going on on the page. That's the idea anyway. Sometimes the hardest part about using these is getting the backer paper off. I like these sort of sticker flake things, but yeah, getting the paper off the back sometimes is the hardest part. Now you notice I'm using these just like it would any other collage tissue over newsprint. And I've covered up these. You can still see them through the background, but I've added this to the top of it to just give something different. That's totally intentional and on purpose. So don't be afraid with your work and your faces to experiment and try something new. It may not work and it may create something that you don't like, but you never know. It might create something wholly unique and different and interesting. My goal is to use all of these ones that I pulled out and then I'll show you what we're going to do next. Now I have these birds that I found and there's four birds on here all together, but I don't want to necessarily use them together, so I'm going to cut them apart. I'm going to use two singularly and then two I'm going to keep together or it's just like with the other stuff, you got to get the backers off. And of course I'm doing this without my reading glasses on, so that's an extra challenge, right? Before I think I'm doing pretty good though. Well, until this one. I like these sticker flakes, but they're kind of a pain to peel. So then you'll notice that we lost a little bit of the work that we did. That's okay. We're going to bring it back a little bit. So we're going to go in here with our pen and we don't even have to put the marks where they originally were. We can just add new marks. That was the black, bold, big crystal pen. Here is the black paint pen. So you'll notice so far in this book working with the faces, I haven't added words to anything. Normally in my work, I am more of a visual storyteller and I usually incorporate words into all of my work. But in this instance, I really want it to be about experimenting, creating faces in new and different ways with the guides and playing with all of the possible opportunities we have for creativity with them. So this is our current one. I hope you like it. I hope it gives you some ideas of just simple, quick things you can do to create an interesting face you can use in your work. This is nothing that was complicated. This was super easy. If I can do it, you can do it. Give it a shot. That's it for right now. If you don't have the guides, you don't have the funds for the guides, there's lots of different things you could use in place of these. Maybe you already have a face stencil in your collection that you could use as sort of a guide, quote, unquote, to create your faces. You don't have to paint through them, although you can. You can use them like we did with a pencil. So look and see what you have in your stash. You can also probably take a magazine image and I'm showing these against white paper. You can't see that. You can also maybe take a magazine image of a face that you like and just use carbon paper to trace that onto your page too. So there's lots of different ways you can do it. If you have something new and unique and clever, a way you can do this, do share it in the comments below. If you have a way of creating faces you want me to try using the guides, leave that also in the comments below. Let's start a discussion. All of the different places you can find me on social media, Facebook art groups, places to support the free content here on YouTube by shopping in my Amazon affiliate store, in my Etsy shop and all that other stuff is in the video description. So check it out and don't forget to like, share and subscribe and above all, go out and have a great day everybody and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. I'll see you later. Bye guys.