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January 24, 2006
scrap workshop: art journaling
by gl. at 12:45 am
on saturday sven & i attended an art journaling workshop at scrap taught by none other than fellow portland artist's way meetup member melanie sage. dayna & her daughter also came, so half the class was artist's way folks!
i got this altered book at first impression while i was flyering earlier in the month: it was definitely one of those purchases i knew i would regret not getting, even though it took me a while to figure out why it was cut in such an odd shape...
...but it's a star when it opens up! how could i resist?
what you're seeing here is the first exercise we did in the workshop, where we were told to pick out 10 things from the benevolence of the scrap warehouse -- and then immediately trade them w/ the next table (meh!). we then had five minutes to add items to the pages (memo to self: always bring your own glue stick to an art workshop, and if you're hosting the workshop, carry twice as many as you think could possibly be needed :). it was very similar to the exuberant collage excercise i do the first day of artist's way: don't think, just DO! then we wrote about "letting go" and added acrylic paint.
this piece needs more work to add depth & texture -- even though we wrote, hardly any of it shows through. of course, the great thing about art journaling is that you can completely paint over any pages you don't like (which is, in fact, what sven did on one of his pieces, and it worked!).
as these pages dried we got to pass around several yummy art journals melanie brought: i wish i could have had more time w/ them. her work is personal and vulnerable w/ layers & doors & hidden bits. you know i can't resist the hidden bits! :)
this was the second exercise, where we picked up three different colors from peerless watercolor cards (i've loved those for years and it was nice to see someone else in love w/ them, too!), then added words & phrases we had cut from old book pages. alas, the star book pages are so thin they were easily saturated with water and stayed so wet so long the words wouldn't stick. so instead, i added the shiny metallic dots and tried playing with a hinged door. i also punched out a big hole in several pages in the lower leftmost corner and collaged a spiral & star beneath it. i was trying to use the eyelet setter, too, but the paper was still too wet and it just ended up tearing a hole (right tip of star).
so alas, as you can tell, this awesome star-shaped book doesn't have very much usable page room and the pages are so thin water tears them up pretty easily, so i see some book alterations in my future. melanie suggested gesso (which will also help cover the text: half-visible text would ordinarily be cool, but this is apparently a diet book and a whole journal of it will drive me nuts), gluing several pages together for strength, and possibly tearing some out to allow for thicker pages.
it was good to meet melanie & i see possibilities for the star journal. you can't beat scrap's price & they have a pretty good working space for individuals -- but it wasn't a good setup for 8 people. four people, yes; 8 people doing messy collage work, definitely not. but i sure am glad i wore art clothes! sven brought an apron. :)
afterwards, dayna walked away with a load of great found paint & stamping supplies; i left with some fabric samples and a tiny green carpet square that said "grass!" to me; and sven walked away w/ a million dollars worth of foam core & colored sand & colored grass/raffia & plastic tubs for, like, $5. hooray for scrap!
posted by gl. | January 24, 2006 12:45 AM | categories: classes & workshops, sketchbook