Back from Art & Soul

Now that the dust has settled from Art & Soul, I can finally get back to my blog...I have a few photos to post from my workshops that were all really great this year...I always learn something that changes the way I work at these workshops and I was so grateful to have Art & Soul come back to my area this year! My first class was called "Totally Plastered" and was taught by Stephanie Lee. She was a great teacher and very open with sharing her techniques and processes. We all got totally plastered with plaster and had a lot of fun...

It is kind of hard to see this piece, but what we did was apply plaster to a plywood substrate, paint it, collage on it and finally we added a few cast plaster pieces. I loved casting the plaster bird heads...they were very Edgar Allen Poe....

My next class was with Doris Arndt and it was called "mighty Mini Metal Journal. I loved this class as well and it was nice to go home at the end of the night with a finished little book. I learned how to emboss metal, color & stamp on leather and how to do a new binding style.

Next was "Adventures in Color" with Claudine Hellmuth. In this class we learned how to mix colors and to match ANY color that we want to just by using the three primaries. I have been mixing paint for a long time and thought I knew what I was doing pretty much, but this class really taught me a fool proof method of color mixing that I will use forever...This is a little tag I made in a color matching round robin we did in class.

Next was Michael De Meng's "lightbulb Shrines" class...As you can see, I have not gotten to the light bulb part and probably never will. I think I like it on it's own. If you can't tell, it is a sculpture of a little dog that I made out of Sculpey combined with a bunch of found objects and then painted to look old and weathered. I used dog biscuits around the base to create a temple of the dog kind of thing...Michael was fun as usual and showed us his new book which is very cool. It is not due out until June, and I think a lot of people may be suprised to learn that it is not a "how to" book. It actually talks about different myths? I think and each piece in the book illustrates that myth along with some art journal style entries. It is really beautifully done with awesome photos and artful layout.

On Sunday, I took the "Pirate's Code" with Juliana Coles and that was a pretty good class as well. You either like her teaching style or you don't...This is my second class with her and each time she gets me to work outside my comfort zone and I really like that.

Last, I took Misty Mawn's "layers on Canvas".....WOW! She is such an amazing teacher and SOOOO open with sharing her techniques. I learned more from her in one hour than I learned all week probably. She makes everything look so easy and effortless of course, but everyone came away with some interesting results. Her approach is very fly by the seat of your pants and get real messy which I liked. She rarely uses brushes, mostly her hands in the paint. I will post my piece from her class when I get it a little bit more done...I have a headless woman right now.

So that was my week in a nutshell! Thanks to Glenny for putting on such a wonderful retreat and thanks to all of the wonderful people I met there this year for your friendship and company. Everyone was really nice and a lot of fun to hang out with!