Art & Soul Portland October 2008

I am Finally getting a chance to update my blog. :-) The first week of October I went to Art & Soul in Portland. I took 4 classes.

I had signed up for a class with DJ Pettit, however she had to cancel due to illness. I hope someday soon to be able to take a class from her. I was sorry to miss that class.

Glenny was able to get Kelly Rae Roberts to teach classes in DJ's time spots. The class I took was really Wonderful! We used old letters, envelopes, junk mail.....whatever we could find to create a collage background. Then we began painting, stamping, and texturing that background to leave only parts of the collaged pieces showing through. We then drew in faces & bodies........YES, hand drew them in. Kelly Rae made this Easy actually. And I was Amazed that it Worked! :-) We then painted in the faces, embellished the clothes, continued to add more texture & color to our backgrounds to create our pictures.

Kelly Rae's book, "Taking Flight" shows these techniques and has many wonderful pictures of her work. I had purchased the book prior to class & had her sign it. It is a Great book!

Here are my projects in this class:

The next class I took was a watch case locket by Richard Salley. The only pictures I would want to share here were my blood blistered finger that I hit four times with the hammer on the dappling block. LOL Only 1 other person in class besides myself had Not had any metalsmithing experience. This class was over my head! Richard Salley was great! I just didn't have the right tools (I had girl tools LOL). I needed better quality tools to be able to do this project. But I Did learn a LOT!

So on to the 3rd class, Soldering for Virgins with Sally Jean Alexander. I Finally got a chance to take this class as it sells out in Seconds after registration opens! I found the class really Great! I thought Sally Jean presented everything very well, I liked her timing and I found her charming. As well as Mr. Sally Jean. I learned a lot and I have proceeded to make charms for a swap later in October and a couple of other projects. I now have 43 charms to make for a retreat in December and I am going to do soldered charms for this also. I think I have a new craft to pursue!

Here are some pix of my charms I did in class:

My final class was with Deb Trotter, "Riding the Paper trail". I really enjoyed this class. I have always admired her art work and finally got a chance to take a class from her. We basically created backgrounds with glue and tissue paper, then layered upon them with images, stamping, then cutting in around the images and tissue paper with pastels which brought out both the background and the images. I finished one project and one is still in progress: