This weekend was so fun! I've been looking forward to this for about two months now, and it lived up to the anticipation. The scrapbook store I go to, Papercraft Clubhouse, had Donna Downey come to town for a weekend of workshops. I took 3 of the 4... one Friday night and two on Saturday.
I met up with my friend Patty (we met at the Mixed Media club at the Clubhouse) to take classes. Before we started, there was a reception where we hung out, chatted, set up for class, etc... I got to chat with Donna bit, reminiscing about the convention in Paris where I first met her and took classes back in 2006. She actually remembered me! But since I think I was the only American there, that's not too surprising... lol.
The Clubhouse also put out a beautiful candy buffet - we could put together our own bag of goodies.
Friday night's class was a "She is Strength" collage. We worked on a 6"x18" canvas and learned lots of techniques. I kind of made it my own - I brought pictures of poppies to go with the theme instead of using the images in the kit. I'm so glad I did... I love the result.
Saturday was a FULL day. We started at 10am with The Big 4-0 - learning 40 mixed media techniques in 5 hours... we got a journal and filled it with ideas so that we can use it as a reference book. They're meant to be starting points for backgrounds, or things that can work together. Here's one of the techniques as we worked through the books - using Distress Stains with stencils.
That was a very fast-paced and jam-packed class, but lots of great ideas. This is going to be a book that I keep close at hand in my studio!
The second Saturday class was "Paint Like an Artist - Stencil Art." I think this was my favorite... we learned how to turn our acrylic paints into spray paints (in spritz bottles) and created layers and layers of stenciled designs as a foundation piece. I didn't get a photo at this stage, but the next one we added doodled paint layers using precision tip bottles... here's what it looked like before I started the next phase.
Then Donna showed us how to take it to the next level by adding the focal images that we were going to build the foreground around:
And here's my final canvas... I love it!
And me with the canvas after 10 hours of workshops!
And that's it! It was a lot of work, but I learned a lot, came away with projects I love, and had a lot of fun. Now we're talking about getting a group to go down and do a weekend at Donna's studio in North Carolina. How fun would that be? We'll see what happens!
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