Recycled paint pallette (part one)

heyhowyadoin.

disclaimer: i was hoping to present to you a nicely organized, step-by-step tutorial with a flourishing finish of a wonderful finished product...but instead i'm stuck.  not sure where to go next with this..thing. whatever it is.  but here goes anyway.  my halfway tutorial:

So anytime i paint, my technique is to squirt out my paints on a sheet of this waxy pallette paper, which allows me to swipe the flat brush back and forth, working the paint into the bristles.  the leftover paint dries.  i pour more on top for the next project, it dries, and so on.

Then i've got this wonderful mess of leftover, dried-up paint. Well this time instead of just throwing that paper away, i decided to make a strange weird face out of it.  like this:

ok so yeah i skipped a few steps in the process, my bad. all i did was find some cool eyes and lips from a magazine, glue them on top of the dried up paint splotches, add a nose and eyebrows with black marker, and cut it out in a face shape.  no big deal, but i think it looks kinda cool.

now i need a background for it. it can't just float around in space, it's creepy enough already.

so i got together some materials:

square piece of cardboard

torn pages from an old vintage romance novel (found at an antique shop, i love digging thru dusty hole-in-the-wall places for good cluttery junk!)

torn pages from a phone book (you know, those stupid old-school things they dump on your doorstep every year)

mod podge (it's so mod..)

cheap paint brush

Proceed to tear pages into smaller pieces and glue randomly all over the cardboard. (i know, the first time you tear pages out of a perfectly good book, it sort of breaks a part of your heart, (if you love to read books, anyway..)  like it feels so sacrilegious or something, but you get over it, you harden your heart...)

Slap those pages down any which-way, doesn't matter.

Let it dry a bit, then i water down some black paint like so...

                                            ..and i swipe the watered down black paint all over the text                                                               background.

i use a baby wipe to pull some off, so some text still shows through.

                         then i decide it needs a little hint of white-ish bricks, so i squirt out some nice thick white gesso... (repeat after me, "gesso is my friend"...you will learn to love it for its yogurty texture and how it covers an-y-thing)...and smoosh it through a brick patterned stencil.

i then go back and forth between white and black, till it feels just right, just dirty enough, like it's from the hood.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnndddd....

now i'm stuck.  this ugly face is staring at me from the brick wall in the hood, and it's just not sitting well with me.  i'll probably have nightmares about it tonight.  any suggestions? does she need hair? 2 eye patches?  definitely some words, i have to know what she's thinking.  are the color splotches real or figurative?  do the colors stand for something?  is she hallucinating? 

i'm so sorry.  i know people look up art blogs for answers.  inspiration.  of which i am providing neither.  i provide you with my raw struggles in the process.  just sharin.

i'll finish this later.  

after i lie down and have nightmares of those eyes...THOSE EYES!!!!!