Workshop with Pam Carriker

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The first weekend of August, I had the pleasure of taking a workshop with Pam Carriker at Donna Downey Studios. This is the second studio workshop I've taken at Donna's place, and she and her husband Bill are wonderful hosts. And Pam was a very fun and patient teacher!  I've admired Pam's work for a while and was initially drawn to her thanks to her book Art at the Speed of Life. Great tips there in finding time to squeeze little bits of art time into very busy lives. The piece above was a work in the art of covering up.  I tried a hand ... I hated it ... so I covered it up. :-) I'm finding that I definitely don't have a light hand myself when it comes to working with the Stabilo All pencil and a water brush.

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Full spread here.  So clearly faces aren't my gift either, but I was determined to try. Love that crazy hair, huh? I'll definitely have to keep practicing on the faces.

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Pam walked us through her process for creating her journal pages and then basically turned us loose. She brought all her paints and inks for us to use as well as all her stamps and stencils. We also had full use of all Donna's supplies there in the studio. That's one of the things I've really loved about workshops there. All supplies are included so you don't have to figure out how to pack and bring it all on a plane! (And they even pick you up at the airport!) The spread above with close up was definitely my favorite of the weekend. Those funky boots just spoke to me; they came from one of Donna's stencils.

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The spread and close up above involved working with tissue paper transfers. What I really liked about this process was flipping the same image over to get a mirror image. Pam supplied us with the image. Not sure where to go from here on this page, so we'll see where it takes me.

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Pam taught us a lot about using a color wheel, both in selecting colors for a page as well as in using a color wheel as an actual design element. I should have layed down some white gesso under this color wheel to make the colors more true and vibrant on top of my fairly busy background, but these are all the colors in Pam's line of paints through Derivan Matisse available at Jerry's Art-a-Rama. They were very fun to work with! Very vibrant, yet sheer at the same time.

I'm thankful to have these opportunities to get away and play with paint and paper every now and then.  They are few and far between since I have so much travel in my new job (going on three years now, but still feels new ...).  I came home energized and ready to clean up my studio and get back to playing more again. Thanks, Pam and Donna! 

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