I am always mentally exhausted by the end of 4 days and 1 evening of classes at Craft Napa. I always tell myself I will take a break day on Saturday, but I never do because I am greedy and want to be exposed to as much information as possible during my 5 days there.
One thing I did figure out this year was to choose my classes based on whether or not I am required to fully engage my brain learning new stuff all day. Since I am not a quilter, taking a class that involves quilting can be stressful, because I am so afraid of missing something. I have a bad habit in collage classes of trying to get out of making the final collage while in the class. I mumble excuses about needing to take it home and add materials that I left behind in order to make it "mine." Anyway, I chose my Thursday night class partly because it looked like we would be turned loose to create fairly early on. We were, and I left early, and am now assembling things needed to keep on with what I learned.
These are not in class order. My Saturday class was called Painterly Pix, taught by Jen Cushman (jencushman.com). She works in mixed media and jewelry making. Here is information on some of her workshops. This is my finished product. And let me tell you I tried hard not to finish it.....I found myself starting to do my usual thing of I can't finish this, let me do it at home, but there were hours left of class and I dove in with the materials at hand and some very useful advice from Jen and ended up with a finished 10 inch canvas piece. I'm realizing I am getting better at making art bits but am still not all that great at actually collaging with them. I have too many choices and I freeze up and do nothing.
Here it is with a digital frame. Frames make so much difference. She did teach us some techniques for making our 3D pieces seem framed though I didn't put them into practice much in this piece.
All but one of these are based on photos that she brought in to let us use. It was a good thing, because my photos were on the wrong type of paper for this technique.
I may pull off these shreddy paper pieces, I'm not sure yet.
Here is one of the sunflowers from the first image, digitally chopped up so I could use it as a background on my cell phone.
A gargoyle that I have dressed up a bit.
With a digital frame:
This was my own photo. The kind of paper I used rapidly absorbed acrylic paints, making them look like gouache paints. While that was a "fail" for the techniques taught in this particular class, it bright to mind a lot of interesting ideas for future works. I have a lot of these little photos made on the big printers during my Photoshop class. They annoyed the printer room supervisor, he said why not just print out a bunch of little photos rather than use their big machines to print out large images comprised of many mini images. But I don't own that kind of printer or have that kind of paper, so I'm glad I printed them out as I did (we lived in fear of annoying whoever was working in the print room, as they had the power to refuse to let you print if you got on their nerves or seemed under prepared).
This next was from my Thursday night class, Mixed Media Fusion Collage, with Sue Bleiweiss. Here is a link to descriptions of some of the workshops she offers at various venues, including this class. I made this one while in a (mostly pleasant) state of exhaustion. I felt the whole thing was too busy, but I like it more as time passes. Sorry about the black lines on some of these, they are images that originally went up on Instagram, which has to be tricked into showing rectangular images (an annoying habit, as many if not most images are rectangular rather than square).
I slapped this one out right before retreating to my hotel room. It has a Chinese joss paper background, some ginkgo stamps (hers) and some really neat skeleton leaves. If you wish to make your own leaves, do a Google or YouTube search. There are several different methods, some quicker but with more caustic materials, some slower, less caustic. It's on my ever growing list of things to do, especially with fig or kiwi leaves.
This was my first sampler of patterns for Judy Coates Perez's Heavy Metal Play. The class was on the last day and I chose well.....I wanted something where I wouldn't have the stress of needing to learn new techniques all day. Though there were technique explanations throughout the day, there were long periods of play. My guess is that pretty much everyone in the class was delighted with the results, though it was a new craft for most all of us.
My first sheet was Zentangle inspired, with a "string" mesh being created first and each space being filled up with a mini-sample of a pattern.
Here is what it looks like after I colored it. I actually went back to it several times during the day to brighten up bits of it.
Shiny stuff refuses to act right when I take photos on my cell phone. That is, it will seem to be in decent focus, the situation will be one that allows clear focus (bright, indirect light), and still once I look at the results, the image comes out fuzzy. Also, depending upon whether or not the flash is on, the colors may look matte and dull.
another fuzz-out:
My next piece, made on blue metal. Not a thing of beauty but a thing of interest....
This was another technique where we learned to make alcohol inks disburse over the surface. I then accentuated those areas by embossing parts of them. Here is it with no flash:
Here it is with flash:
Another view with flash:
And yet another view, in a dark environment, with flash. All the same sheet of metal, so many different ways to see it.
And last, my favorite. In fact, I think this is one of the prettiest objects I have ever made. The class had access to various photos to start out our work. Another woman at my table chose the same photo, but her interpretation was completely different. This is what makes all of these art classes so interesting....no two people, when given the opportunity to make their own choices, interpret the same shapes the same way.
without flash:
I am absolutely in love with this metalwork embossing, and have all the materials I need, including some rather hard to find tools, but haven't spent much time on it since I've come home. This is why I need to select certain weeks to work on certain projects. And then document it, and encourage myself to do more. There is one drawback to the metal embossing, which is that it is quite delicate once finished. I am adding backing to it that will make it less so, but haven't perfected my technique of smoothing the backing. I should make some little samplers and see if I can make them strong.
Last shown here is the class I took on the first two days, Surface Explorations, with Leslie Tucker Jenison. To take this class we carpooled out to the countryside, "Pokey's Barn" to be precise. Though a bit of a cool environment in the dead of winter (it is a barn, after all), it is still a great location to make art because you have tons of room and you are surrounded by hills, trees, fields, passing wildlife. We were a bit inconvenienced by the weather the first day because we were making sun prints and there was only rain and wind, but by the second day the prints came out much darker. And the rain made some fantastic prints as the drops gathered on top of the plexiglass weights and made their own shadows. We also did shibori dying with indigo, so both processes produced blue and white fabrics, except for those pre-colored fabrics that we started dying on day two.
Below are the results of resist dying with clamped shapes; the first one with the ovals is on a kind of scrim fabric that Target calls "cheesecloth" but is way stronger that regular cheesecloth. It dyes very deep colors. The second two are from fabric that was already variegated, ombre-style.
Some sun prints: the dark leaf is day 2, when there was actual sun. The leaf is a foam board stamp, with the veins cut out.
Once upon a time I made an alphabet out of foam board and kept the base. It's a great way of adding letters to things, especially since I can't bring myself to tear apart books yet in my quest for novelty.
Another leaf stamp, plus some mesh ribbon Day 2 on the bottom.
An array of my house-like stamps. They were pre-stamped onto acetate.
Soy wax resist dyed in indigo. I really need to go on a major thrift store hunt for ancient potato mashers!
More masher resist:
We also indigo dyed paper, which is a much trickier proposition. This was the teacher's left over nature print. Indigo seems to just roll off of the paper unless you stir it around in the muck that forms at the bottom of the vat.
Shibori tied mountain shapes, on pre-patterned fabric:
Potato mashers on strips of ombre fabric.
Potato masher on pre-dyed fabric.
A complex soy wax resist pattern on pre=printed fabric:
The fabric was preprinted with a honeycomb design. The waxing tool was overloaded with wax and made big waxy blobs, but they came out delicate looking because of the background pattern.
Soy wax on pre-printed fabric. Soy wax is a bugger to remove, requiring lots of left over newspaper pages. Lucky my friends/neighbors still get the Sunday paper!
This post is now seriously belated.....I finished Craft Napa about a month and a half ago. But it's actually quite useful to let some of this information get a bit old and needing review before posting. It helps me hold onto what I have learned, and also allows me to sternly remind myself that I need to put all of this into practice again, soon.
The sun dying kits are very expensive; I can prepare my own fabric with a two substance kit that is at Dick Blicks's. I will then be able to treat a variety of fabrics and will get more interesting results.
Any one of these projects could be followed up on for months and months. It's interesting to see which things I am nervous about taking up and which become reliable skills that I take back up repeatedly. Stamp carving has become a reliable skill, metal engraving has not yet. Zentangle drawing is a slightly reliable skill, but I rarely feel like I am investigating it as deeply as I would like.
Some day I may admit to myself that there are limited hours to the day, week, month, even year, and I will make some practical choices, but for now, it's full speed ahead, intermittently, in many different directions.
My last memory of Craft Napa is spending the two days that followed, often in my hotel room, as it was raining often, and coming down with a mystery ailment. It's no fun to have a mystery ailment when you are some distance from home, or the nearest Kaiser Hospital branch, and all by yourself. In fact, I am still not sure how much was ailment and how much was pure loneliness. Normally, I enjoy my loneliness and take full advantage of it. And I still did, to some extent, getting in a decent walk each day, taking photos of trees and mushrooms and birds, stopping by the best local thrift store, etc.
In fact, the thrift store was quite nice. I always find great crafting supplies there. Last year, however, I had this really uncomfortable feeling as one of the women seemed to think I was trying to shoplift. This time, by chance, she was also there, but we were both much friendlier and my social paranoias were laid to rest, at least until next year.
Das it. Belated or not, time to move onto some more current projects.
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