What's Coming in 2017!

My calendar is beginning to look pretty booked up for 2017.  Starting in January, I will be traveling to a few places I haven't been too in several years,  January through October, I will be teaching several classes & workshops that I am really looking forward to.  Subjects include: Watercolor, Screen Printing, Paper Collage, Abstract Acrylic, Gelli Printing and more!  Plus I will be taking a few workshops this year as well. I love to learn new things.  It's going to be a fun, productive year!

Image is of a gelli print I made a few years ago. These make the most awesome backgrounds for greeting cards, art journals, ATC cards, etc. 

Learning Something New

Watercolor painting is something I have taken up and put down so many times over the years that I lost track of how many times I've attempted to finish just one painting. Well, I am challenging myself to pick it up again.  I read some very interesting books recently, such as: "Watercolor-The Spirit of Spontaneity" by: Karlyn Holman and another book by the same author: "Watercolor without Boundaries" plus a few others written by various authors.  Anyway, what I learned was I was approaching this medium from the wrong direction.  Being a painter most of my life, using oils & acrylics, I finally figured out that watercolors are done using the opposite approach. You start with the lightest color in your palette and build up the color, instead of creating the background first and moving forward to the final layers.  So, anyway, without going into to much detail, let me just say, the light-bulb went off and I finally feel I might be able to actually finish a painting.
I've spent the past 6 months creating a series of acrylic glaze paintings and poured acrylics, that using what I learned with these thinned paints, should help me to better master the right combination of water with paint.

This is the photo I took while in Las Vegas this past week, with the plan of creating a watercolor from the image.  Not a typical tourist photo, but I love these faded colors and the reflection from the pool is amazing.  There was a duck in the fountain, creating these wonderful ripples.  This is a patio bar outside of Caesar's Hotel & Casino on a day when it was a comfortable 74o.  Loved it!

Mixed Media Workshop

Do you remember bleaching your jeans back in the late 60's?  For a few days last week and again yesterday because I hadn't put all my stuff away yet, I played with bleach and discharging fabrics.  I had forgotten just how much fun this can be.  (Please remember to use caution-you are using bleach!-with fumes!) I work outside on my screened in porch-some people would call this a "Florida Room" and it's large enough I can spread out and get a good breeze for good ventilation.  When we were splattering our jeans we hadn't developed specific bleaching techniques yet, but today-well today we have a whole store full of bleaching tools and things to use to discharge fabrics.  Foam stamps, fun foam to design your own printing plates, foam brushes, fabric texture plates, clay texture plates, plastic tools, special spray bottles and the list goes on.  So, I gathered up all of these supplies that I would normally use for other techniques and decided to see just what they would do combined with either some liquid bleach or soft gel.  I gathered up a good supply (several yards) of a variety of every black fabric I could find in the quilting room.  I tore these into manageable sizes, roughly a fat quarter size and after dragging it all outside, setting up my work area with pans of water and buckets of soapy water to drop fabrics in. I got started.  It all went so fast because bleach reacts fast, so in a matter of a couple of hours I was done.  I wasn't satisfied, I needed more time to play-so I washed all the tools, emptied all the buckets and washed all the fabrics I had discharged and went to find more fabrics.  I gathered up colored, hand-dyed, printed and over-dyed.  Whatever I could find that held some interest and I went at it again the next day.  Still not satisfied, I attacked my closet for clothes to discharge and wow!  I hit the mother-lode and created some pretty awesome workout clothes to wear to the gym!  DH says he would buy some clothes like that too-so I'd better go attack his closet next!  :-D
Anyway, next month over at the Latest Trends in Mixed Media yahoo group-I will be sharing some of these awesome techniques with you in a free workshop I am putting together.  If you are not a member yet, please go click the button in my sidebar and get yourself registered as a participant in the bleach discharging workshop class.  Come join the fun!

Artist Workshop-Sorry this Workshop is now Closed

The artist workshop will begin Feb. 1, 2009 and sign ups are available now. In order to participate you must have a digital camera that can be manually set to the correct settings and photo altering software. To learn more about this 4 week workshop please visit: http://artistworkshopretreat.blogspot.com/