Demo: inks, gesso, collage on w/c paper 10 X 11″
The Playful Muse group met Thursday morning for the first of a three week series. All seats taken in this first in-person workshop I’ve taught since moving to Olympia! And I couldn’t be happier to have these fellow travelers exploring mixed media fun, riding the waves of that shared creative energy. They all came prepared and plunged right in. The art studio I’m renting from a new artist friend is cozy and well appointed with a big table for each person. After the holidays I’ll continue to offer these Muse Group series. If you’re local to Olympia and interested in Muse workshops next year, let me know!
The first lesson was inks and gesso applied with a variety of tools. In the picture above, can you see where the acrylic inks and gesso were dropper/dropped, spritzed, finger blended, rollered, scraped with a serrated tool, drawn into with a rubber color shaper, stamped with a custom-made soft linoleum stamp, and squirted with a water streamer?
I’d forgotten to bring my brushes and had to borrow one just to wet a shape on the paper first so that colors would shoot into rivers blending like the salt and fresh water in our rivers here. As usual and by design I had no plan to start out with, just a lingering sense of awe from the short drive to the studio, past trees and bushes of flaming, out-of-gamut color! I was not the only one in the group who couldn’t resist the warmest colors in our palettes.
The second step in the painting was to add some collage, and I grabbed an old music book with Roaring Nineties music and picked the lyrics When the Robin nests again!
Because even with the glorious colors of fall, I am already longing also for spring. Fickle thing, the mind. Here’s how it came out when I finished the piece and did the free write (edited version here)
I claim to be at peace with all the seasons
Each color in my palette there to celebrate
This week I am blazing fall foliage
Dancing sizzling salsa
Next week I am the winter strains of melancholy
Blues and wooly grays
And when the robins nest again
The bunnies, bees, blooms, butterflies
. . . the greens of peace again.
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