Sea Air Art's Creative Blog

The final day of Fabrications; the thrills, the chills…

The art is drying outside so we can get it packed up at day’s end (click to enlarge any photo). After 3 days of frenzied activity, I had 7 pieces either finished or near finished and a good start on an 8th. OK, so some of them are unmitigated crudola. It’s hard to layer a bazillion different techniques on one canvas and not over do it a bit  P”””

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I won’t even show you the ones that are going to get cut-up, but here are the ones that are only “bad”.
Green Man is done, if I put any more layers on this one, it will implode from it’s own weight.

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Planet is still in progress. I have hopes that it can be saved but I’m probably being a bit optimistic. If you never see an update on this one, you know I lost the battle.

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This one has some hope, it only has 3 layers and I’m thinking it doesn’t need much more.

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This was the cloth I used to wipe off my brushes and marking tools – what is wrong with the fact I like this better than most of my artistic attempts. Sad, that.

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This is my favorite. Simple, clean; only ink, gesso, and a touch of paint. This one definitely has a future, maybe to be mounted on a raw edge stripped quilt back ground?

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My conclusions? The class was fabulous. I was enthralled with some of the techniques. I did miss the feel of fabric that is not coated with gesso or gloss medium. But some of the ideas and the methodology we acquired will find its way into my future efforts. I also learned the value of less is more. I think I would have liked my pieces more if I had simply limited myself to 3 layers per canvas.

Ya, less is best.

Deb H

Fabrications; Day 2 (a little late)

With so much to keep us busy it was hard to post as often as I would have liked. We had classes all day, activities at night, wine to drink and fiber friends to socialize with. What’s a girl to do?

Did I mention it was beautiful here?

I returned home to my Internet service still being wholly uncooperative. This forces me to sit in a Starbucks and drink cappuccino while I access my e-mail and Blog – gee, poor me.

Opening night was a meet and greet and Lynn K had the quilt show With One Voice on display for our up-close and grateful perusal. Fabulous work! Oh, and there was wine.  Hey, we could walk to our rooms.  ;o)

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The next morning (Wednesday) was our first class – of which I posted last week. My class was Surface design and Collage with Fran Skiles.

Wednesday night we had a demo by the fabulous Carol-the-print-maker on printing with gel plates, very cool. I did not get pictures of either evening event as I was setting up my table of wares to sell hand dyed yarns, silk noil fabric and odd bits of supplies left over from my old business (fiber art supplies).

Desi Vaughn also had a table with her much drooled on hand painted and hand dyed cotton fabrics. Yes, I now have seven more to add to my collection.  )  Despite the negative press on our economy, sales were decent.

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Class on Day Two was a bevy of new (to me) techniques and more layers to our canvases. You will notice our tables are a bit more “cluttered” than they were on day one. Collage is not my thing so I struggled a bit, but persevered and learned a lot of great stuff.

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Case in point; the image transfer technique that involves Pellon’s Stitch ‘N Tear, Watercolor Crayons, and gloss medium… think “silk screening”. The photo is the Pellon “screen” on the left and the prints it made on Chinese paper on the right. You can get 3 to 6 prints from a colored screen. We did ones from rubbings (nothing in the hotel or out of it was safe from us) and from coloring on the Pellon.

We also tortured silk gauze with white and black gesso. I learned that if you do it on a plastic table cover that already has lots of dried paint on it, you get colored gesso!

It was not all serious hard work though. Cathy A, the head Guru of Fabrications wandered in to innocently see how we were all fairing.

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It cost her dearly as several students decided Cathy would make a good canvas. Von added the final sinister touches.

The evenings entertainment (again, we brought wine) had Kathy B showing us how to make mini doll pins. Mine’s a Vulcan, nice ears, eh?

Some of them had several other odd embellishments.
We won’t even discuss Von’s doll’s attributes. ;o0

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As usual, all pictures are click-to-big-able.

More later,
Deb H