This morning was another mobile session of Wednesday Morning at Joan's. Joan, Leann, and I had an art date and went over to the Village Theater at Cherry Hill to see the 20th Annual Canton Fine Arts Exhibition.
It was pretty cool having the whole place to ourselves! All three of us were drawn to a pen and ink piece by Ron DePentu called "Grape Eater". I think there were just too many people at the opening reception and I missed seeing it the first time. I have included a number of detail images from the piece -- I am just fascinated by the straight lines making the curved images. I really like all the colors in the lines, too.
On the way home Joan and Leann and I went to a late breakfast/early lunch at Crawford's in Old Town in Plymouth. Really good food -- especially the acorn squash soup. I love butternut squash soup and I am sometime a little leery about ordering it for fear it will be too sweet. This was totally different...more like half chunky/half mashed up squash in a light broth...I got a cup to bring home, too. And our waiter was delightful.
Then I came home and worked on my idea that I finally had for this month's artist trading cards theme -- The Devil Made Me Do It. I wanted to incorporate collaged elements with acrylic paint and lettering but nothing was cooperating. The paint wasn't drying quickly enough to be able to add the wording to the surface and then the cards were really warping...it just wasn't happening. I will try the concept with another theme when I can put more time into it and experiment more.
Ruth and I had no cards to trade this month, but we wanted to go to the meeting because we wanted to see Jane's demo on paper mosaics. With a few tweaks of her own, Jane guided us through some of the basics of cutting strips of decorative papers and using a laminating material to make small sections of patterned papers. Jane found examples in Susan Seymour's book "Perfect Paper Mosaics".
Jane's samples were fantastic! I have little to no patience with measuring and cutting paper accurately -- and needing a lot of pieces that are going to fit together and figuring out a pattern, but I enjoyed the project very much. It is definitely too math-y of a process for me personally, but I really liked how many people's pieces turned out. It is the sort of work that I love to look at and admire the work and precision that go into it...but that I am pretty much incapable of creating myself. A lot of the members of the group are also people who sew and are used to cutting and being fairly accurate and piecing things together.
Just before Jane got started with her demo, Leann talks about the optional book project we will be starting next month.
We also welcomed our newest member Jan to the group.
This was a project that I needed to follow along as closely as possible (so no photos while I was listening) -- and I still needed a lot of help and coaching from Barb (who was sitting next to me and who knows how to use the paper cutter I had with me...the one I have had for years and have never used until tonight.) Thanks, Barb!
These are all Jane's samples/examples.
See how uniformly the strips of paper are?
Heh...this is mine. No sense of what papers/patterns/colors will go together to make a repeatable pattern or contrast enough to be interesting.
I really enjoyed trying it out, though!
And -- of course -- here is Leann's. Evenly spaced...evenly cut...with a really good sense of putting four papers together...but hey -- this is just not my strength and that is fine.
Next month's theme for the artist trading cards is: "poetry".
And the theme that won for the optional 4"x6" book is: "house"...I am looking forward to working on that. We will get more details next month.
AND -- at the end of the meeting, Karen showed me her prototype for Art-o-mat. Wow -- it is really wonderful -- I can't wait to stock it in my machines!!! More details on that once it has been accepted for the project.
1 comment:
Your talents will come in time, Jilly Bean!
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