Super Quadruple Wowsers!

I can't believe the work that I did at Art Unraveled. I could only go for two days and I did a silly thing and signed up for two day classes and two night classes. But boy, am I ever glad that I did!

I took Jane LaFazio's (go here for her blog) Two Art Quilts on Monday during the day. We made our first quilt of an animal, usually a pet. I used a photo of Mr. Chancy Pants that I'd PhotoShopped the living daylights out of. I really like the results and I'm not even finished painting it! Once I've finished that, I'll machine quilt it along the drawn lines and maybe do some free motion work on it. It looks exactly like him!

The second quilt we did was a landscape quilt that we started before lunch. By the end of the day, I had nearly all of the lines of fabric sewn down by hand, ready for some hand or machine embroidery. The landscape I did is one that Alison Holt did on her Machine Embroidery DVD. It's been stuck in my head since I watched her video and I've even drawn it several times.

That evening after meeting up with old friends and people I'd never met from email groups and round robins (and a Mojito), I took Mable Dean's very last class ever, Fabulous Flag Books. It was fun and I got to meet Susan who lives next door to my cousin. Imagine reading someone's blog and discovering that there are just too many coincidences for this fellow whose birthday they are celebrating not to be my own cousin! Same first name, same thing he always says about himself, both live in Texas, same birthday, same wife's name, and finally, they both tutor students at the local university and are both published authors! A link to his books showed that it is my favorite cousin to whom they live next door! This is a small world after all! Mable was a dear and her class was fun and well-prepared. She gave us materials for twice as many books as we were able to make within the time limitations of the class.

I just forgot to take photos of all of my Monday projects. Sorry. I've got the quilts done but I don't have the books available right now. :(

On Tuesday, I took two watercolor journaling classes. Regular readers might say, "Didn't you take watercolor journaling at AU last year with Bev Brazelton?" Yes, I did. And I love it. And I realized that while I've tried nearly every media art has to offer, the only two that are really left for me to try are pastels and watercolor. I want to paint real things with watercolor.

And have them actually bear a resemblance to what I think I'm painting!

Enter Barbara Roth (go here for her blog) with an all day class on getting started with using watercolor in your journal. I had agonized over which paints to buy, going back and forth between a selection of artist grade watercolors, the ones I've collected through the years, a Cotman watercolor travel set, and just buying tubes of Winsor Newton Cotman student grade paints. I ended up at the last minute buying the Cotman paints. I wish I had bought one or two more reds and another yellow and an orange. Maybe a darker brown. I was happy that I'd gone ahead and bought Hooker's Green, a color that I find indispensable.

Barbara is very generous with her knowledge and herself as a teacher. She points out the handy little tricks which are what make workshops worth taking. We went on a tour of Europe and came away with projects to do from France, Greece, and Italy, though we only did one in class. We spent the morning sketching, working on shape, shadows, and value. We spent the afternoon painting. Here's what I did from a tracing of one of Barbara's sketches, used for expediency's sake.

I was delighted to discover that I already knew more than half the people in my evening class with Jane LaFazio, Sketching and Watercolor in Your Illustrated Journal. One of them was Barbara, the teacher of my morning class! We sketched again, then we painted and thought about what to journal on the page and how to frame it. I got inspired and sort of took off on my own. Here are the results.