Weekend Art Frenzy

Hi all!  It was a seriously long Winter.  I've only recently gotten my creative energy back, and soon I'll show off what I've done on my own.  But I just spent a fantastic weekend with my mom taking Seth Apter's workshops, and I just have to get out a quick lunchtime blog post about them.

Mom and I took classes from Seth before when he was at our local shop, and this year when we heard he was coming down again, I was afraid I'd have to miss it because I just don't have the money for all the classes I want to take.  But Mom paid my way as my birthday present, so I was able to go with her after all!  Seth is fantastic, and if you ever have the chance to take a class with him, do it.  He's very fun, very chill, and very encouraging.  And, like Michelle Ward, his classes use a project as a vehicle for learning techniques, so you do have something concrete to take home, but it's not going to look like anybody else's in the class except in form.

Friday night was all about working with the Spellbinders' medallion sets and dies.  We layered them with all kinds of found objects, and made backgrounds that we could mount them on if we wanted to (which I did).  I'll have to come back and add pictures of my projects from that class, because I was having so much fun I didn't think to take many pictures!

Saturday's class was on painting techniques, which we used on vintage book covers that we then made a book out of themselves.  Super cool.  I learned how awesome fiber paste is, and he introduced us to some new sprays that I really really like.  They don't flatten out to the surface as they dry, but stay dimensional in the shapes of the drips and spatters that they land in.  So cool.  Anyway, those pictures are on my phone and I can't post them at my desk because of terrible reception in here, so I will add them later, too.

What I do have pictures of that I can access on my work computer is yesterday's class.  It was called 52 Card Pick-Up, and once again taught painting techniques but also collage principles, this time to create a weekly journal or art book out of a deck of playing cards.  Now, me, I used Magic: The Gathering cards that my friends were going to discard from their new boxes, but they're the same size.  But of course, with that being the origin of my cards, I kept thinking of the stages of the process in terms of phases of the game.  Most of the day was spent in what I thought of as the deck-building phase. 

So much texture and color...

This was kind of like a drafting phase.  What do I want to do with which cards?

I call this the summoning phase, because I actually picked cards and made them work with me.

It was a blast.  I really want to keep working on my deck, because I rarely finish projects from classes but this one is really cool and easy to work on a little at a time.  Plus, I plan for it to be a fantasy inspiration deck, where instead of journaling on the blank sides, I'm going to write quotations about or from fairy tales on them.  Then, when I'm running low on imaginative energy, I can just draw a card and think about what's on it.  That's the plan, anyway.  In any case, this weekend was so fun!  It's a little hard going back to work after spending days in art utopia.