The 2016 An Artful Journey Project...

For this last Artful Journey, I took a class with Leighanna Light. I love that Leighanna calls herself a "Thingmaker!"  We created two "decks," one metal and one out of canvas and plaster. The individual pages are 6" tall by 3" wide. It's so hard to share this project in pictures. You really need to hold it!

The rabbit collage above is an example of the metal deck. And an example of an "oops!" that I fixed! Behind that rabbit was another collage that didn't work out very well because I used a cool owl napkin separated out into just the top ply, but I placed it over a darker background. Because the owl was white, he just faded into the dark background and you really couldn't see him. A classmate had this beautiful little bunny that she shared with me, and she fit perfectly over the owl and ultimately became the cover of the deck. The substrate is the metal, and then I added some old book paper, two different kinds of tissue paper, added in a little cheesecloth there on the left and finished it with the keyhole and some keys. I used keyholes throughout the whole deck.

I did another collage with the owl (above), making him stand out much more clearly by using a piece of very light cream book paper behind him, and he then became my other favorite in the metal deck.

Above is an example of the plaster on canvas. We started with canvas pieces and then added your basic Venetian plaster from Lowe's with a palette knife. Here I added the plaster to the canvas through a stencil and then added watered down acrylic paints for color and then topped it with a gold metallic Shiva paint stick borrowed from another classmate. I loved that paint stick and used it on quite a few pages! Must get some!

Above is another example of the plaster on canvas technique, also done with a stencil and palette knife. Leighanna's work is gorgeous and she used pretty earth tone colors in her examples, but if you've been following this blog for any length of time, you know I'm not a muted earth tone kind of girl. Give me glorious, riotous color!

Most of the metal pages contain little added doodads as embellishment. I used my trusty Crop-A-Dile to punch the holes and add the eyelets. I started adding the embellishments the last afternoon of the class but just got frustrated because I knew my jewelry tools and wire I had at home would make the job much easier, so I finally gave up and finished it all up at home.

I could share tons of pictures here with you, but it would probably be easier for you to just pop over to this Flickr set which contains tons of pictures of the whole project.

In closing, what can I say about this whole journey? I started my journey into mixed media by taking a huge leap and attending DJ Pettit's class at An Artful Journey in 2010. I had very little experience at the time and immediately felt like I was in way over my head. But through the help of DJ's encouragement and gentle guidance, I produced a crazy-color Kelly version of a DJ book that I'm still incredibly proud of to this day. That year followed classes with Albie Smith (twice!) that lit a fire for my love of bookmaking, and a class with Orly Avineri, who challenged me to give into the process and try things a little differently. Not sure I ever told Orly, and I realize I never shared it here, but one of the spreads from the journal I created in Orly's class was selected for publication in Dawn Sokol's book A World of Art Journal Pages. (I'm on page 214 and featured on the Table of Contents page.) So my last journey was with Leighanna, and such a delight she was. She was funny and free-spirited and gave us free reign to completely make it our own. "Sure! Try that!" was heard often!  I wasn't sure what I'd do with this mess of metal and plaster cards when I brought them home, but I'm so happy I combined the two together and ended up with something I want to carry around with me and show everyone I see!

Thank you, Cindy Woods, for providing this vehicle for artistic growth for so many lucky women. I'm forever grateful to you for creating the avenue to my very first art retreat and now, six years later, constant paint and glue under my fingernails, happily.  You can see posts from all my Artful Journeys with Cindy here.