Category Archives: workshops

Indigo Blue, Take Two

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The magic of indigo never gets old, even to novice fiber artists like me. Sunday’s workshop was flat-out fun – many thanks go to Mary Ann Johnson, whose expertise in shibori and dyeing greatly enhanced our experience. The weather was perfect – our fabric dried quickly in the breeze and the sunshine on our makeshift clothesline.

Here are the basics of how we did it:
The fabric is tied, clamped, rusted stitched, crumpled – any or all. Then it is submerged slowly into the indigo vat for about a minute. The bound fabric is gently removed from the dye bath, avoiding  splashing or dripping into the vat, as this introduces oxygen back into the dye. The fabric looks green when you first take it out of the bucket. This is when the magic happens (or to be more precise, chemistry). Indigo develops its color when it is exposed to oxygen. Once the fabric is in contact with the air, it starts changing color and turns from green to blue. You can see some of this happening in the video, below.

If you are new to this process, I highly recommend that you start with the Jacquard Indigo Kit. It has everything you need to make true indigo plant-based dye. The video below, from Jacquard, shows how to do it.

Things to watch out for – holes in rubber gloves!  The biggest danger, though, is addiction to indigo dyeing, particularly when you realize it can also dye paper and yarn.

I can’t wait to cover some journals with my indigo fabric, and perhaps combine indigo-dyed paper with encaustic. It’s true blue indigo love!

 

 

Indigo Wednesday

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blue

I’ve scheduled a few Wednesday afternoon workshops this spring at the Studio  and it’s working out well. Yesterday’s Indigo session was kind of a “test drive” of the three hour format – the second Indigo workshop is on Sunday, and there is another special request group on Monday, so the Studio will be blue for almost a week.

Wednesday’s participants had some excellent suggestions about how to keep the dyeing process flowing during the short three hours. It was a rainy day, so our drying was done inside or on the bench under the awning. Everything clicked, the indigo did its magic, and we had a fantastic time.

I’ll be wrapping up the indigo experiences next week and will give you some tips and resources on how you can do this at home or in your own studio. One of the most-repeated comments from yesterday’s students was , “This is sooooo much easier than I thought it would be!” And it is!

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Sunday’s workshop rocked

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GET IT? It was a Pebble Mosaic workshop! Well, the pun may be bad, but the workshop was great – David Chidgey, Master Mosaicist, did a splendid job of teaching us how to turn pebbles into art. We learned new terms, such as “Interstice” (pronounced inter-STEE-cee) and “scratch coat.” We delighted in picking through bins of tiny multi-colored pebbles looking for just the right one to fit our designs. There wasn’t (much) rock throwing. Honest.

Free free to admire our results in the video (below). Not bad for beginners – high fives to everyone, especially David!

I was afraid for a while that I’d never make it home in time for the workshop. My plane out of Boston was delayed and I missed a connection in Minneapolis and had to stay there overnight. Unfortunately, that caused me to miss the opening of the HotWax/Cold Wax show in Kerrville. Bummer. But I’ll get there soon.

One good thing the trip delay provided was extra time to play with some iPad art. I’m trying to learn ProCreate, a really cool digital art program that I had mentioned in an earlier blog post. The experimental work below is a photo of my water bottle in the seat-back pocket on the plane, combined with a selfie and some other stuff, including some filters and special effects. (You can see a warning about keeping your seat-belt fastened while seated if you look closely.)

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So, see – you can make art anywhere, even on a plane (especially if you have an iPad), and out of anything, even plain old pebbles (especially if you have David Chidgey). Artists are never at a loss for fodder.

Hope you all have a great week – it sure is nice to be back in Texas.

PS – Registration for most of the summer workshops at the Studio is now open at this link – yay!

Composition Camp – transferring ideas

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In yesterday’s workshop at the Studio, we explored composition through a mixed-media collage process using Ebony pencils, watercolor pencils, stencils, graphite transfer paper, white tempera paint, TAP heat transfers and digitally altered images. This non-traditional combination of tools led to some pretty spectacular results!

Image transfer, whether done with graphite sheets, TAP paper, gel mediums or any other method is simply another way of selectively inputting and arranging images on a substrate. It’s neither “cheating” or “tracing.” Even if drawing is not your forte, you can use graphite media to produce striking lights and darks in a classic drafting  style. Look at some of the work by iconic painter Larry Rivers to see how a master uses this technique.

We had some poets and prose writers in yesterday’s group – always a good sign for cross-genre inspiration! And our post-workshop critique was one of the best I can remember. There were lots of dream images and personal insights floating around. Fascinating stuff! Here are a few photos from a very rich and productive afternoon! Thanks, All!

I’m headed to Boston tomorrow for a few days so I can see the family and come home with a renewed appreciation of South Texas temperatures (it’s supposed to be 17F while I’m there – yikes). Now, y’all go outside, smell the Mountain Laurel, and bask in this lovely weather!

Texas Mountain Laurel - scratch and sniff :)

Texas Mountain Laurel – scratch and sniff 🙂

 

 

I screen, you screen . . .

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lisa

Lisa Stamper Meyer, “Mysterious Miasmas” Acrylic on Paper

What a treat to have the multi-talented Lisa Stamper Meyer at my Studio yesterday teaching a workshop on Silk Screening for Mixed Media Artists! Lisa is amazing – You can see her work at The Gallery at Gruene Lake Village. She’s a patient teacher, generous in her expertise.

I have to admit that I wasn’t ready to add one more thing to my repertoire, but – wrong! This process has so many possibilities. Everyone who participated said the same thing. The inspirations for using this idea on fiber, on handmade paper, with encaustic are unllimited – I’m sold!

Take a look at the video, and then do some exploring on the EZscreen process with the links I’ve listed at the end of this post – many thanks to Lisa for an amazing afternoon.

ezscreenprint.com

ikonicsimaging.com

speedballart.com

Composition Campers win merit badges for bravery in collage!

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The Composition Camp workshop yesterday was very, very cool – every single participant found a “right answer” to the assignment, and each answer was both unique and excellent.

First, we reviewed a slide show of composition examples like the one below based on my AB3 system  – the AB3s are Alignment, Breathing room , and Threes or thirds.:

"Three" Lyn Belisle, mixed media collage

“Three” Lyn Belisle, mixed media collage

pear

 

Then, the first assignment started with a pear – everyone got a 5×7″ substrate of watercolor paper  and a printed inkjet photograph of a green pear.

Instructions were to demonstrate great composition while building  a collage that started with identical images  – and they did!

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For their second assignment, students were encouraged to choose their own images from a National Geographic magazine, and that went just as well as the first challenge.

Both projects started with water media and images and ended with layers of textured beeswax.

Everyone shared ideas and inspired each other, but no two finished works were remotely the same. Some went completely toward abstraction and some retained the imagery. Take a look at the video – what amazing surface design and variety!

This session of Composition Camp was a huge success – yay!

Oh, and before I say goodbye for now, we have TWO Friday Freebie winners of the two Paper Pocket Purses – one winner is Quinn Jennings of Washington DC and the other  is d.price@satx.rr.com ! Y’all email me your mailing addresses, and your freebies will be on their way to you!

Thanks to everyone for subscribing to SHARDS.

Calligraphy Guild, a project for YOU, and a Friday Freebie – or two . . .

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10Last night, I visited the San Antonio Calligraphy Guild to show them how to make a pretty paper pocket purse/pendant project (say that three times fast) and a folding votive screen card. Calligraphers are nice people! I can’t wait to see how they take these projects and adapt them to their own many talents.

Here are some photos – there were 30+ participants, all cutting and gluing and having fun and following the directions (mostly!)

ppppI thought that YOU might like to have the directions for the pretty paper pocket purse, so as the first Friday Freebie, I’m giving you a link to the downloadable Pocket Pattern handout that I gave the calligraphers last night. All you need is 9×12″ construction paper and 8.5×11″ decorative paper, plus some ribbon and such. Easy!

And to sweeten the deal (after all, it’s getting close to Valentine’s Day), I’ll give away TWO Friday Freebies, the little purses pictured below, one to each of two lucky SHARDS subscribers. Just be a subscriber by Sunday at midnight – winners announced Monday morning. Good luck, and happy weekend!!

Dragonfly

Dragonfly

Gaisha

geisha

Saturday catch-up: collages, challenges and show&tell

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It’s been a busy week – I taught a beeswax workshop with the San Antonio Art Education Association at a workshop on Tuesday, and then spent Thursday at the Studio with Gloria Hill and Lisa Stamper Meyer.Here are our collages from that art playdate – can you believe that three artists with the same challenge could come up with such different results? Fascinating.

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And speaking of collages and challenges, congrats to Rosemary Uchniat who won the random stuff challenge with this powerful collage. I saw her “before” pile of stuff and am in awe of the way she pulled it together – it belongs in a gallery!

Rosemary, your prize is an Artist Sampler of Three Face Shards to use as you like. What will you come up with this time? It’s always interesting.

toni copyToni Curtis from LA also sent in her wonderful collage which morphed into a journal cover – nice, Toni!  Check out Toni’s Heart of the Gypsy Facebook page. It’s fun to challenge yourself to an out-of-the box diversion – try it.

And finally, today is the first Show and Tell of 2016 – my favorite Studio event!

In the lineup today are painters, poets, authors, card makers, fiber artists – and Chef Mikey himself, who will share the Studio’s signature dessert recipe of Sopaipilla Cheesecake. Hope to see you there from 2-4!

Composition Camp commences with collages

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compcampcoldemo

My demo collage created during Sunday’s Composition Camp workshop – 8×10″, mixed media, titled “Again?”

First workshop of the year taught by ME (yay!- I love teaching workshops) was Part One of Composition Camp. So what is Composition Camp?? It’s an intensive three-hour workshop directed toward planning and starting your artwork with strong composition bones, no matter in what medium. And it’s super easy.

I’ve developed a composition system called the AB3’s, which stands for

  • Alignment
  • Breathing Room
  • Threes and Thirds

It’s kind of like a simple kick-start for your artwork because it lets you know in advance where your main elements will be most effective. The students in yesterday’s Composition Camp: Collage workshop were given a folder with photos of a random person and a random cat along with some scraps of paper – they had to make a narrative collage using only those elements.  Everyone  took the challenge and ran with it. Take a look!

Before we began our work yesterday, we talked about painterly influences on collage imagery, particularly the works of Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg, two of my favorite artists ever. Rauschenberg said that he works “in the gap between art and life,”  that he wanted to question the distinction between everyday objects and art objects. I like that!

Robert Rauschenberg, Buffalo II, 1964

Larry Rivers, French Money, 1962

It’s always good to go to the Masters for inspiration! There are two more sessions of Composition Camp to come, and there will be more in the summer and fall.

Workshop with Clare O’Neill – transforming photographs with pigment and wax

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I am now the proud owner of one of those Clare O'Neill brought one of her iconic works as a gift for me - I am thrilled! His name is Pasta, and he is a wild mustang - wow!

Clare O’Neill brought one of her iconic works as a gift for me – I am thrilled! His name is Pasta, and he is a wild mustang.

It’s been an exciting two days at the Studio – nationally-acclaimed photographer and photoencaustic artist Clare O’Neill has been sharing her techniques with a very fortunate group of us who wanted to learn how she produces those luminous beeswax-enhanced fine art photographic works.

Clare did not disappoint – one of her great skills is encouraging students to take the techniques she demonstrates and adapt them to their own personal styles. You can see in the video (below) how many different approaches and experimental works came out of the two-day workshop. It was really fascinating to watch the creative paths diverge into wonderfully finished works.

Tomorrow we start the second two-day session – I can’t wait to see how this group of students responds to Clare’s teaching. Stay tuned . . . .