First Class: Roxanne Padgett, Lush Layered Canvas

In this class, we started out with blank canvas, and did, you guessed it, layers.  Which has always been intimidating to me, but now I get it.  Not as hard as I thought it would be.  Start out big, with big brush strokes, splodges of color, and maybe some scribbles.

I made some goofy faces in my scribbles.

Added some collage--just ripped paper of some images Roxanne had for us to use.  Started stenciling, which was super fun with paint, because it looks like spray paint, but without the fumes!  We used scrapboo- type stencils, and later she showed us how to make our own stencils really easily, using transparencies.

This is my final product for this canvas.  We made some of our own stamps out of a couple layers of fun foam.  The pink one is mine, as well as the blue trapezoid.  I really like the trapezoid, and it's so simple!  Another cool thing Roxanne showed us was collograph, which she said is just a fancy word for crayon rubbing.  She gave us each a set of chipboard alphabet letters, and we peeled off the backings and stuck the letters on a piece of cardstock.  Some people spelled things or lined them up staight, but I did mine randomly.  Then you put the piece of cardstock UNDER your canvas, unwrap a crayon and hold it sideways (NOT point down) and rub over the canvas. The letters showed up wonderfully on this piece of canvas, which was artists' canvas (the stuff they stretch over a frame), because it was nice and stiff.  The other pieces of fabric she gave us didn't work as well with the rubbing because they had too much give and stretched and moved while I was rubbing.

This piece is regular muslin from the fabric store.  You can see the crayon rubbings didn't come out quite as clear. I used the punched out alphabet card to make another rubbing, which I thought looked pretty cool, too.

I love how the orange lacy stencil over the yellow paint  on the left edge (btw--this is all just cheapie acrylic paint, no spendy golden brand) looks like spray paint!

I think this is stage 2 and the one above is the final one...there's not enough yellow in this one yet.

So here was the hardest one for me to start, because it was NOT a blank canvas, but a cotton print.  So I started with white and a couple collage images.

I stayed with the blue color pallette, and did some big bold circle stencils, then some little blue circles, and a couple flowers and hands.  And that rockin' dancin' dude.  I loved that stencil.

You can see a little bit on the flowers how I added some blue accents.  I also scribbled a bit with a white out pen.

So that was all the canvases I did. We had one more piece of stretchy white fabric that was a bit silky, as well as a thick piece of white paper to work with, but I couldn't do that many in one day.  I decided three was enough for me, so I would have more fun and not be rushing.

Each class was a whole day long, in two 3-hour chunks with lunch in between.