For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on the back-end of the upcoming Lone Star Horizons show, an exhibit of Texas landscapes in every media imaginable that opens at the San Antonio Art League & Museum on January 6th. Our Juror, Harold Joiner of Houston, had a tough job choosing 50 pieces from the 200 submitted.

Setting up a Call for Entry like this one is kind of complicated, but once it’s up and running, as the admin you get to see all of the entries come in via digital photos before the Juror sees them and makes his selections. So I’ve been viewing landscapes in all forms and media for the last two weeks and thinking about how we create them as artists.

Landscapes, as I have said before, are the most popular subject for paintings because they suggest a sense of homeland, a place just over the hill or down the road where we truly belong and will be happy at last.

All of those thoughts reminded me of one of my early online workshops called SMALL WORLDS: Creating Fantasy Landscapes with Altered Paper. This course was first presented over ten years ago as part of the summer program at Artful Gathering and quickly became one of the most popular in-person workshops at my Studio.You can still see many of these collaged landscapes in galleries around town with torn CitraSolv paper and other altered collage materials.

Tying this all these landscape thoughts together with this season of homecoming and sheltering seemed natural (I’m writing this on the night of the Winter Solstice) I figured  that this oldie-but-goodie workshop might be just the perfect thing to offer you as a holiday gift for a limited time. There are a zillion techniques for altered papers in this workshop and lots of composition tips. You’ll have fun with it.

You’ll need to go to my Teachable Studio page first, then find the Small Worlds workshop – here’s the link.

Go ahead and register for the course (it normally costs $29) and when you check out, use the coupon code FREEDEC31. That means the course is free for you until December 31st. Go ahead a check out and you will see from the screen shots below that you will be charged zero dollars! Free is good.

When you submit you payment, you will see that your total becomes $0.00.

Giving credit where credit is due, my friend Eva Macie was one of the first artists to discover the possibilities of CitraSolv on magazine pages. She’s even on the CitraSolv website! Thanks, Eva!

So enjoy creating landscapes, and thinking about homecomings and the promise of good things to come down the road and over the hill into the New Year. Thanks, as always, for reading SHARDS.

Lyn