Sheltering In Place

For those of you who may have some extra time on your hands and could use a little bit of online creative community, I have created a new online workshop called "De-Stress with Art". It is a series of five projects that are designed to help you relax and focus while making beautiful images. You can see the full description here, and sign up if you like.

We'll start with mandalas, as they are soothing to create, and yet they offer a lot of creative possibility. Actually, we make half mandalas, so that we can put them together in unexpected ways.

My inclination was to offer something for free, but at the same time many of my workshops are being cancelled, so my own income for this year is pretty uncertain. My compromise is to offer this class for $100, considerably less than my other online classes. All my YouTube videos are free, so please use those as a resource for your creative endeavors.

Stay healthy! If you can, enjoy the change of pace, though I'm sure that is not possible or easy for many

The Visual Sentence

I have been experimenting with a process of assembling prints (from the gel plate and foam relief plates) into pieces, which reminds me of stringing words together to make sentences. Each print has a few elements - they are not just all-over patterns - and combining them offers a fresh approach to 'composing'. I learned this process from Joyce Silverstone at North Country Studio Workshops last January. See my post about it here. Whereas in a collage, your substrate determines the boundaries of the piece, in 'scrolling' (Joyce's term for the process), you assemble the parts without a substrate and make up the boundaries as you go along.

 

Above are a few pieces that I assembled visually, and then scanned the parts and put them together digitally. These are available as prints and products on Pixels/Fine Art America.

I will be teaching "The Visual Sentence" later this year in Montreal, and next year at Hudson River Valley Art Workshops. Stay tuned to my calendar.

Making hearts is a way to engage in painting or collage without taking it too seriously. How can you agonize over your image when it is the most over-used, cliché of clichés in the realm of shapes?

For this reason I am offering a workshop on mixed media techniques in which we use the heart as the image. It is called Light Hearted, and I'll be offering it along with other workshops at Art and Soul this May in Colorado Springs. Read about it here. See my other workshop here.

In the video I am using Utrecht acrylic matte medium to adhere the collage to the substrate, and also for the top coat. It is my favorite matte medium for collage. The markers are Posca, which are opaque paint markers.

These and other 'light hearted' images are available as prints or on products through Pixels/Fine Art America. Click here for prints and products.