Chunky Botanicals

Every year Art Unraveled takes place in Phoenix. It's a week long adventure of artist workshops, artistic experimentation and being in the company of like minded souls.

Last year I decided to focus on drawing and visual journaling workshops.

 The first workshop was "10 Objects, 10 Ways," with artist Jane LaFazio. I did the each exercise twice. Above are the 10 objects on two facing journal pages.

 Then I did each object larger, on a page of its' own.

 "Learning to See" with artist Lisa Cheney-Jorgensen came next. Drawing often sends me in a panic. Remnants of my college drawing days.

 I had a blast.

It was great to get out the watercolors again. That was an art school class I enjoyed and did well in.

Every year there is often a technique exchange by students who attended AU the previous year.

This year we worked on chunky pages, 4" x 4" art works.

The specimens.

Orange Bells-a hummingbird favorite.

Tipu tree leaves. This was one of the techniques from the workshop where we painted the background rather than the object. Salt was added to the drying paint creating the mottled texture.

Palo Verde tree bloom. Reminds me of a hibiscus flower but having the flower almost up my nose, this was what I saw.

 

 Desert marigold. All the drawings were done using pencil, ink pen, watercolor and water soluable marker.

My pages were mailed out last week. The arrival of the package of eveyone's pages will be one fun mail day.

Marissa

Back to Making Art

I've been keeping these goodies to myself for a few weeks. Here are my chunky book pages for the recent Art Unraveled chunky page exchange.
A little background. Art Unraveled is a yearly, week long art retreat held each August in Phoenix. I've attended workshops with artists from all over the US for about 6 years. Attendees come from the US and abroad to join in the fun and art making. I've met some wonderful people and learned so much.
Part of the fun of learning is sharing our experience. We do this in a small way with a technique exchange. Those interested sign up to make chunky pages, a 4"x4" page, using techniques learned from recent AU workshops.

I had an idea in mind and then looked around the studio to see what I had on hand for the project. I knew I was going to have a window so I decided to use a punch and would cut 4"x8" pages to fold in half. I made some samples to make sure my tools would work with the thickness of the paper and with the aluminum tape I intended to use for a border.

 Next step: dig through my stamps. I was looking for stamps with text.

 The result-multiple stamped papers ready to paint on.

 

I did add one strip of paper torn from books to each paper for an added layer of text. Cut strips of aluminum tape.

My "spray booth." I've used sprays and gotten color all over my table unintentionally. I now use this box when spraying and have prevented further accidents. I use some paper scraps under my project to absorb excess color. I keep the scraps on hand and use them in collages.

 The painted pages.

Although I tried out all the tools and techniques ahead of time, I had difficulties and had to make some modifications along the way. The butterfly punch that worked well on the cardstock, did not work with the added book page. I had do dig out a die for the butterfly shaped windows.

The border punch didn't work multiple times on the aluminum tape. The adhesive gummed up the punch. I settled on punching the card stock and painting it silver. The "Plan B" silver paint was an adventure too. My favorite bottles were dried up!

The finished paged with a butterfly transparency sandwiched between the folded cardstock.

The techniques were inspired by two of the workshops I attended at Art Unraveled 2011, Ingrid Dijkers "Octopus' Garden" and Daniel Essig's "Window Sampler" workshop.

Marissa

Art Unraveled 2010

It's taken me a few days but I finally have some time to share a bit of my Art Unraveled experiences. For the unfamiliar, Art Unraveled is a week long art experience of workshops by artists from all over the U.S. Participants travel from all over to take workshops, make friends and shop at the extravaganza of the Vendor Fair.Wed. Started off with "Layers of Joy" with Cory Celaya. It was a class full of tons of information. She broke it down in sections which kept it from being too overwhelming. Looking through her beautiful journal was a major treat. It was stunning! It was full of an incredible amount of layers of techniques. Some very subtle but bringing the whole collage to life.We started out with simple water color backgrounds.Then more backgrounds. Scraped paint on newspaper. The technique wasn't new but on newspaper? Ding! The light bulb went on. This was cool! I did some stamping with white paint on the paper to the left. Cory has some rubber stamps available and I wanted to try out some of her designs.Next step was to use our watercolored papers for background and then our painted papers to assemble a collage. This one is in progress.
I need one more thing and this one is done. Busy, I know. That seems to be my style...Wed. night: "Ancient Amulets" with Laurie Mika. Polymer clay is not my media of choice. My results never did much for me. Looking at these that were made in the class, mine still don't "shine" like the others but I understand the material better. Mine are the round piece on the bottom right, and the piece to the left on the second row from the bottom.I do like my pieces. They should become part of some future projects.

Thursday:Botanical Journal with Angie Platten (and Tracie Lynn Huskamp). This class was originally to be taught by Tracie Lynn Huskamp. She published a book about botanical journals that I was real excited about. Then she couldn't come to Phoenix to teach the class and I was so disappointed.
I was on the verge of canceling until she emailed that she would be in contact with the new instructor, sharing her tips and tricks and sending examples and some supplies.This is my outside cover. The beads might be a little much but I love beaded bindings. So this is what it is. The Queen's Anne's Lace on the cover was from Tracie. The leaves on the back cover are from my garden. It's either from the Popcorn plant or the Tipu tree. They're so similar, I can't tell until I take the book and compare it next to the real plant.
The book. Nujabi paper from India-I was nuts for this paper a few months ago. It has such a high rag content and is soft to the touch but very rough and natural looking. Anyhow... we started our page prep with painting with coffee. I added some color left over from painting the covers which gave the pages a little departure from all the soft browns.
Inside front cover and first page. Fabric, lace, handmade papers, Pressed yellow bells and mesquite leaves from my garden. I'd been planning by taking clippings from the garden and pressing them.
If I'd had any reservations about the class, they were quickly swept away. Angie was a great instructor. Her example was beautiful. Our books couldn't have been any better. (I've seen some of her examples at Creative Quest in Glendale where she also teaches and those are great too)!
Friday was spent back-to-school shopping with the Chicklet. I made her the happiest Chicklet by buying her the much wanted skinny jeans.
Friday night was "Mixed Media Charm Bracelet" with Peggy K. I'm not that crazy about working small and wire wrapping, etc. I'm an "all thumbs" kinda gal when it comes to that, lol. This class was a blast. Look at all the fun stuff on the bracelet!
Peggy gave us all a pouch of goodies and had bead boxes of goodies to add as we went along. I hauled beads, baubles and fun stuff from home to add as well. I should be wearing this in the next week.
I had a much needed break until Sunday. No vendor fair for me. Teacher/August=No $$$$$.

Sunday: "Tasty Textured Squares" with Gail Russakov. I've been wanting to take this class since I saw the ladies walking out of this workshop two years ago! Aren't these gorgeous?!
Here's my green one. It's destined for the Chicklet's room. It's made with magazine pages, Elmer's glue, Never Dull, and painted papers. Mmmmmmmm...I made two... I had prepared two canvases and cut two sets of papers for the class. Gail came by and wasn't sure about the two but I told her I worked fast, so I gave it a shot. The red one uses gesso in place of the Elmer's glue. Those would be the lighter, white outlines. I'm glad I was able to try both materials to see the difference.
This collage has less contrast of darks and brights so I'm looking as this piece as a background in need of a focal point. We tried some greens that looked good. I'm also thinking of aqua/turquoise because I love that color combination.

Last but not least, Sunday evening/Monday: "Mosaics" with Katherine England.
This is Katherine's example, above.
This one is my finished project.

It was sort of funny how I ended up with a crown. The class description listed butterflies and skulls as our options. A few days before class we received an email mentioning Lazy Susans, crowns and frames. When it came time to get our forms, crowns weren't one of the options. I had something long and skinny in mind and nothing else was going to work. So I didn't choose anything and was trying to figure out what to do instead. The crowns were there but they were big. Katherine was concerned about my getting finished since all this was new to me. As you can see, I got my crown!

The great thing about this beeing a 2 day class was that I was able to go home and gather my baubles. Half the fun is finding out how to use the stuff from home that's been taking up space for awhile.Next time, you're at Dollar Tree, you'll find these there. Even the multi-colored, worm like, shapes. They're pricey elsewhere but I saw them still for a buck yesterday.
We cut glass for the mosaic pieces. I used glass pony beads from Big Lots, black, ceramic beads from JoAnn's, the glass "worms" and frosty, glass baubles from the dollar store for the row under the mirror. Cutting the mirror was my first task and it was hard. Everything else seemed a lot easier after that.
The bottom part of the piece seemed very precise. I wanted the top part to be more loose and frivolous. The heart and eye beads and the silver sunflowers were added with glue after everything had been grouted. the sunflowers were another find. They were originally meant to hang on clip as table cloth weights that I found at Big Lots.

The mirror is also destined for the Chicklet's room. She's expanding from the "Pink Palace" to adding more green in her room. The rest of the house is out of wall space and I seem to take a lot of my projects to school. Nope, these are staying home!

Tuesday was back to school and back to work. AU is over for this year but next years' is already in the planning stages. I'm planning for the first day of school tomorrow. Year 15 of teaching begins.

Marissa

Made some changes....

to my blog. Very minor, but changes, never-the-less.
There's been some discussion on the Art Unraveled message board about the difficulty in reading blogs with a black background. I have to admit that I need to make an appointment for new glasses. I look above or below my lens to thread needles and look at anything in detail. Oh, I am so not willing to admit that I need bifocals!
From various design classes, I did know that reading text on a black background is harder on the eyes BUT.......... I always place art work on black backgrounds so the colors pop and lesson distraction. I played around with some lighter colored backgrounds and I just saw blah and blah and blah. I didn't like the colors of my photos. I trying out grey and might go lighter later. The font is also bigger.

Got an opinion? I'd like to hear it.

Happy Sunday!

Marissa
PS-Photos are from Downtown Phoenix

Melting Pot of Ideas

After the wild ride of eating, sleeping and drinking art for the last 7 days the real challenge starts now.

I have some wonderful projects from this week that resemble the work of Anne Grgich, Traci Bautista, Beryl Taylor and Leighanna Light. Aside from getting the unfinished ones done now the question is, "how do I take what I've learned and make it my own?"

Voice Lessons with Carla Sonheim included a one-on-one critique of work created prior to the class that we'd brought with us. Carla went around and was able to look, evaluate, answer questions, etc. as everyone else worked. It was interesting to hear the comments and conversations. I was sure it was going to look as if my work was busy, chaotic, just coming short of including the kitchen sink. That wasn't the case at all.

Isn't it funny what our perspective is of our own work? I am very comfortable creating in a workshop environment. I enjoy the sharing of ideas and feeding off the energy and enthusiasm. Yet, working on my own, in the studio, I am constantly full of self doubt. I often ask myself, "how is what I do any different than what's already out there?" (For one, I 'm not afraid to use a nipple from a baby bottle in my work, lol).
Those kind of doubts come up with blogging too. How is what I write interesting and engaging enough for people to read and then enough to keep them coming back to read more? But more often than not, I just write. Then I read. I'm so glad more of my friends are creating their own blogs. It's the modern version of, "reach out and touch someone..." With school starting I won't be able to get together with the gal pals much. Blogging helps me feel connected.

Here's another tidbit as a result of AU. I mentioned, in therapy, that "lovely" pit in my stomach when I was drawing with charcoal this week. That dread of drawing classes in college. Even that gorgeous guy walking on campus turning out to be our nude model wasn't enough to make me dread the class any less!

Nan, (my therapist), zeroed in on my comment and told me to focus on that, find my target, bring a piece of charcoal next time and we'll work on it. I asked, how is it that in a span of weeks all these issues are coming to a head? "It's time," she said, I'm ready for a change. Grrrrrrrreat!
Now what did I do with that !#$%&@* piece of charcoal?

So far, so good. I've made some wisecracks about my therapy this summer about how it's working. I've found myself reacting to situations differently, for the better. It's refreshing not letting myself get all tangled up and stressed out. What's the expression? "Getting my knickers in a twist..." I'm not doing that. It's a good thing.

I seem to be getting a little introspective and perhaps a tad sappy. Not my intention to go off in that tangent. I do want to make use of all the knowledge and inspiration from this past week.
In between all of that I have to figure out what to teach kindergarteners next week. They're cute but I'm better with bigger kids. They get my jokes...This will be the first year I teach all the kinder kids as opposed to only one class per year.
Plus, we made some alterations to the schedule where the music teacher and I see 3 grade levels twice a week per quarter. Then she and I switch grade levels the following quarter. I'll see Kinder, 2nd and 5th 1st Quarter, while she gets 1st, 3rd and 4th graders. I may have the grade levels a bit mixed up but it's something like that. We're hoping this will help the students retain information better so we spend more time on content rather than reviewing. It saves on prep time too. I only have to prepare 3 lessons a week instead of six.

I'm not ready to think like a teacher. I still want to think like an artist. I'm pretty lucky that I can sort of do both. I might start my older kids with an Anne Grgich style portrait. OOoooh, fun!The pics were taken at Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort last weekend before Art Unraveled. A whole different world, isn't it?