Art Journaling Workshop

Over the weekend FenVAC hosted an art exhibition as part of a local town's Medieval Festival festivities. During the exhibition we offered some free workshops and my contribution, with my lovely friend, Kath, was on the subject of art journaling. It would have been difficult to cover the entire topic in the two hour slot I had so it was more of an informal introduction to art journaling with lots of journals and journaling books to look at and plenty of different art materials to play with. We had lovely participants, adults and children, who all threw themselves into journaling, some for the first time, and had great fun! We used self portraits as our theme which proved a very popular choice. Here we all are getting down to arty business:



I started on a self portrait journal page of my own during the worskhop which I have since finished:



The night before the workshop I had been playing about with an inkjet photo transfer technique that I read about in Corey Moortgat's book, The Art of Personal Imagery, where you spray water onto the inkjet image, lay paper on top, burnish and hey presto, a transfer of your image. ;o) After making a couple of transfers the photo was still wet so I used the end of my spoon to idly add spirals (one of my favourite shapes and one I'm increasingly drawn to) and outline the figure. At the weekend I added some colour to the image with various pens and ink, taped it to my background (which is mount board with acrylic and gesso baby wiped on and pen added on the corners) with masking tape and added a variety of text.

Pollocking Good Fun!

Last week I joined forces with my artist friend, Richard Savage, to produce a scarecrow for a local competition during June and July. This year's theme is famous people, real or fictional, and we, of course, chose an artist! This is Mr Jackson Pollock! ;oD





I have to admit I didn't have much of a hand in making the scarecrow, Richard made a fab job of the head and another friend made his body, I just helped slap a bit of paint on and get him decently dressed! ;oD

The most fun though was creating a Pollock style painting to stand alongside the figure to give folk a clue as to who he is!! We joined two life torn canvases together making one whole canvas of about 3' by 8' and covered them in more canvas before starting our drip and run extravaganza! We both now have more of an appreciation of Pollock's working method as it took forever to get the paint to the right consistency!! However, once we got the paint sorted we had great fun flicking it about! ;oD Don't even ask how much cleaning up it took afterwards! LOL





If you're local you can see our man outside the Honest John public house, South Park Street, Chatteris, PE16 6AR from this weekend until the end of July.

'Cos Dads are Special!

My latest joint exhibition with Rob is all set to open on Monday. ;o) We're exhibiting a variety of work, some previously seen, some new. It would be fair to say that this one has be a challenge for a number of reasons but we're nearly there and it's time to celebrate so if you're in the vicinity on Tuesday evening, come along and meet us, peruse our work and partake of a nibble & drink! ;o)