New Class - New Ideas - Fear and Trepidation

The past 10 days I have been taking a new on-line class through Jeanne Oliver Creative Network.  I am doing this voluntarily.  No one is making me.  But it is really hard and sort of scary.  This class is called Figuratively Speaking and the teacher is Dina Wakely.  Wonderful teacher.

But I do not have experience painting.  Full stop.  How card can it be you wonder?  Just a paintbrush and paint?  Well - that is what I thought.  It looks so easy when you watch someone on the computer - but then it is hard when you try it yourself.  I feel like a Klutz.

But - I did work thru the entire class and did the projects and took photos to share.  Here they are:

This is an exercise called Carrot People.  It is a technique used by watercolor artists to grab shapes of people.  Simple and fun to tilt their little bodies all over the place.

Then we traced the general outline of a person from a fashion magazine just to get their abstract shape.  Simple lines being the goal.  Then painted the tracing paper.  Have you ever painted tracing paper?  It wrinkles like crazy.  Then adding words with tissue paper printed with words and glued down, then gluing the whole person to a background.

Whew.  Again - not in my wheelhouse of skills.  BUT I learned a lot about adding both dark and light to the background to make it interesting.  I am a bit of a monochromatic artist so this was really good to think about and add.

Three more figures done the same way.  Spooky looking guys.

Then it got a little harder.  These are two tags where we painted and lettered randomly in the background and then painted around the figure.  All of the color in the figure is actually the background painting. You just have to imagine where the figure is and then start painting.  This is where I realized my lack of painting skill.  Yikes!  But - They turned out OK eventually.

Two more tags.  One of the new skills which is lots of fun is Asemic Writing, a wordless open semantic form of writing.  It is meant to draw the viewer into the piece to try to figure out the meaning.  It is sort of like organized scribbling with lots of loopy upper and lower parts.  It is against my basic nature to be sloppy in any way and this feels sloppy to me but it is also fun once you get started.

This is a detail of one of the tags.  You can see the weaving that was added after the paint dried.

And here is the final project.  Making a little booklet out of the larger piece of painted watercolor paper by folding and cutting and stitching and adding writing and stenciling.  And there is one of my little tracing paper people on the front.

The purpose of the book is to make a place for all of the little tags to live.  The book is constructed to leave little pockets between each page at the top so that the tags can be inserted.  This give you an idea of how that looks.



So here is my overall feeling about this class:
I am very grateful to have had this experience because it makes me realize once again, as a teacher, what it feels like to feel awkward and unsure and even embarrassed by what I am making as I learn a new skill.  I really think this will make me a better teacher.
And - this is good for my BRAIN.  It definitely feels like my brain s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d.  A good thing.

Some Days Are Like That!

This is a busy time of year and I have been distracted by things other than fabric art projects.  Lots of household tasks and lots of working on paper - painting little pictures and things like that.

Actually I have felt like my "muse" has taken a vacation for a while.  Do you have a Creative Muse?  I feel her presence whenever I am creating happily away in my studio.  Or just sitting somewhere with ideas for projects bombarding my imagination.  She is distinctly THERE or..... sometimes.... not.

So when she is away (presumably on a warm beach relaxing in the sun and drinking an umbrella drink) I miss her.  But I find other things to catch up on.  But ---- then I really want her to return and inspire me.  To do that I try to find a simple project with fabric that will get the creative juices flowing.

The picture above is what I worked on to do that this week.  It will be a lovely banner to hang between two trees in our front yard to welcome folks.  You can see what happens when my muse is away on vacation!

I was actually feeling quite happy with my little self when I finished sewing all the flags to string that would act as a hanger.  Until I held it up and realized...... oops!  I started laughing out loud.  I don't make mistakes like that!  I sent a photo to several friends to give them a laugh as well.

And then of course I fixed it today.  I do believe that Life has a grand way of reminding a person (especially when she is feeling sort of proud of herself) that she too is a bit goofy and silly at times.