After a Day with Wyanne

I spent the day playing around with Wyanne in her studio on Friday. So much fun! It was so nice to sit around with a friend and play with no deadlines and no particular “must do’s” in mind. This is the piece I created. Can’t say it’s a showstopper, but at least I learned an awful lot! There are actually several layers to this piece. First I painted the canvas and then collaged background papers over that, and then I added a little more paint here and there. Next I colored the house with watercolor crayons and pencils, adding a little water to blend them in, and collaged the house to the piece. I stamped the trees with a rubber stamp I had and then added some painted touches to the trees and the bushes up front. The “107” and “home” were the final additions. One of the best things about learning how to do something is learning how not to do something! There are definitely some mistakes in there, but I’ll better know what to do next time because of them.

Once I finished, Wy told me she actually walked me through a lot of advanced techniques, simply so I could see that it’s doable. She then suggested I go home and try to recreate the piece I brought her as something I really liked, since she felt it was a much simpler process than the one I carried out in her studio. I think my biggest challenge will be that I’m a bit of a perfectionist. Wy said that’s what makes me a very good jewelry designer…but I’ll need to let a little bit of that go to work with collage and mixed media. But I’ll give it a shot….when I can carve out the time.

That’s my issue. Time. At my guitar lesson the past two weeks, we’ve put the guitar aside and played around on the piano (Gary teaches, guitar, piano and drums…) We’ll do that occasionally when I’m getting frustrated with the guitar; piano was my first love so it reminds me that I do have some musical talent! :-) Gary taught me the basics of a jam session without music, something I’ve always wanted to learn how to do. Put a piece of sheet music in front of me and I can rock with Mozart, but I never learned the techniques behind just jamming in a particular key, essentially creating your own music. It was fun! And once he showed me the secrets behind it and I started catching on to the rhythm behind the chops, what I thought was hard was really much simplier than I had imagined. I happily realized I could probably pick up the technique fairly easily…given the time to practice it. Time is most definitely my most precious commodity.

I’d love to play around with the collage and mixed media techniques Wyanne taught me, and hopefully I’ll get to do that before I forget what she showed me, but for now, I must get back to the jewelry bench. I have my first arts festival of the spring coming up in less than three weeks, the Bartow Bloomin’ Arts Festival, March 8-9. Par for the course, I’m sure I’ll be up until midnight the full week before the show building up my inventory… In the meantime, I’ll have tons of collage ideas running around in my head keeping me up at night. Thanks so much for a great day, Wyanne!

Like this post? Click here to sign up for free weekly email reminders. Click here for the Happy Shack Designs website.