An Artful Journey: Day 2, Artful Abundance!

Day 2 of the trip was Day 1 of the class. DJ is such an incredible teacher and shared so many different techniques. She’s middle left here in the yellow vest. I learned so much, it truly was overwhelming at times! We started out painting tissue paper with a mixture of acrylic paint and watered down matte medium. It was here I learned that matte medium and gel medium (in all its various forms) are not the same thing! There are so many ‘mediums’ that it was hard to keep up at times!

Above is a picture of some of my painted tissue papers. DJ showed us how to cut up smaller pieces of tissue paper, strips of telephone book pages (which she brought from her home in Oregon) and even pieces of string and other small items and then sandwich them between two sheets of tissue paper. It was pretty cool.

Here’s another shot of them. Sorry the light was less than ideal here, but I think you can see the string sandwiched in there. I tried to make the shape of a flower out of the string.

Here’s a shot of some of my classmates' papers drying. It was so interesting that many of our papers started out bright and colorful, but most of them ended up much more muted (um, except mine…muted is apparently not in my vocabulary).

Once the painted tissue papers were completely dry, we glued them to plain muslin with more matte medium. You can see the tissue paper here on this finished page of my book. I included little cut up pieces of DJ’s phone book on this page. :-) I did five tissue muslin pages in total.The fun green rick rack on this page came from my wonderful friend, Davi. Davi made my apron! I will share some pictures of that with you soon! It's totally fantabulous!

Next we took more muslin and covered it in molding paste. I’ve never even heard of molding paste, but it was fun to play with! It has a thick, creamy consistency and dried white on the fabric, and you could manipulate it for some good texture on the fabric. Then we painted color washes over the dried molding paste muslin pages. This picture is a finished molding paste page in my book. See that cute little tab? There are three of them in my book, and they are one of my favorite things! DJ brought us the feathers from her friend’s bird, and I backed my feathers with sheet music to carry through the music theme of my book. I did four molding paste muslin pages, and I think I’ll do some journaling on them.

Friday afternoon between class and dinner, I was back in my cottage when I looked out the window and, boom!, there were three deer right there! I took this shot from the window. I immediately called the girls to tell them about it and quickly remembered the time change. It was only 2:30 at home, so I rambled on excitedly on the answering machine until it ran out!

I went outside to try to catch a closer shot, but this gal was the only one who stood her ground for me for at least a few minutes before walking off down the trail. After that, I saw dozens more deer over the rest of the weekend.

Friday was also the day a nasty cold hit me full force. I ran into Los Gatos after dinner to find a CVS for some cold meds, and then stumbled across the most wonderful family owned toy store and loaded up on goodies for the girls before I headed back to the center for vendor night. I had told myself I was going to be a good girl at vendor night, but alas, that simply wasn’t possible. There was so much good stuff! I bought some beautiful ribbon and a few collage pages from a local shop, some gorgeous handmade papers from Albie Smith, some prints from DJ, and a CD full of gorgeous bird images from Lesley Riley. Albie and Lesley were also teaching at the retreat. I used the ribbon, some of Albie’s papers and two of DJ’s prints in my finished book. The page above is an example! This is one of DJ’s painted photograph pieces. She took the photo in Hawaii and then painted into it. We learned that technique on Day 3.
Friday was also the day the bonding started happening. To me, this was just as enjoyable as learning new art techniques. My cottage mates were Gwynne, Donna, Denise, Leah and Beth. Beth traveled all the way from England! After her weekend full of inspiration, she went home and started her blog. I had the honor being her first follower! Gwynne, Donna, Denise and Leah are all from California, and Leah ended up becoming my best bud at the retreat; I love you, Leah! She was in DJ’s class as well, so we had a LOT of time together (just wait until I tell you about Saturday and Sunday). Gwynne was in Nina’s class, Donna was in Lesley’s class, Denise was in Albie’s class, and Beth was in Kelly Rae and Mati Rose’s class, so between our little cottage, we represented the entire retreat! Everyone was so wonderful. We all made jokes about our spaceship tube shower. There’s really no other way to describe it. It was like a Star Trek tele-porter tube or something, but with nice hot water! I also finally got to meet Roben-Marie and Chrissy in person. They are fabulous! Roben-Marie is such an inspiration, and I just fell in love with Chrissy and her infectious spirit. Roben-Marie was in my class, but I didn't get to spend near enough time with Chrissy. Hopefully, we'll meet again! Day 3 tomorrow!