Laurie Mika's Clay Quilt Class

First of all, I hate pasta makers and conditioning clay.  I'd only ever taken one other clay class and hated it, and I don't like most of what I see made with clay.  But I saw Mika's work and was intrigued.  The class was fabulous! No pasta makers! We just used rolling pins and lots of rubber stamps.  It was great.  I'm a convert.

I did not do mine like a quilt, mine was more like houses.  I like architecture, and I added some little gears for fun.  I was really pleased with the results I got.  I definitely want to play with this stuff more.

Here's what my clay looked like before painting:

And here's what it looked like painted and baked:

I might have added too much paint, but I don't care.  It was my first try painting clay.  I love it.

Here's one someone else did that really appealed to me, as I love bingo numbers and numbers in general.  Most of the other people did jewel tones and I don't like those colors--turqoise with orange and purple.  Bleah.

Here's some of Mika's work that she had on display:

I LOVE this one.  I think that's a tooth!  I have some teeth I got from a shop that I could do something like this with, and I also have some tiny shells that would be fun to use for a little window thingie like this.  I love how she gets her color on the clay so uneven and variegated.  The black and gold look great together.

Iron Chef part 3

So here's some of Jesse Reno's work on Iron Chef:  Oh, and he didn't use anything in the bag.  He just did his painting thing, then after he was done he arranged Barbie and a couple other things around the edge of the painting.  Kind of cheating.  But who cares, right?  Because he's just so fascinating to watch as he paints.  I want to take his class next year.

Here's another few that I liked:

I love how her headgear looks like one of those old-timey hair dryers.

I like the color scheme combined with the creepiness.  Creepiness doesn't have to be dark--it can be bright and happy!

I don't know what all she used from the bag--I think just the box and the blue ring.  Mostly I love the big architectural stamp in white.  The photos are interesting, too.  It does seem to tell some kind of story.  That was the problem with a lot of the pieces made--they weren't cohesive, just busy.  But, hey, it's 45 minutes!

I like the colored wings here. 

Iron Chef part 2

I don't know who this artist was but I liked her final result better than DeMeng's.  I like DeMeng's stuff but I'm not a worshipper.  I like Halloween/creepy stuff like this as a rule, and I thought she did a great job with the painting on the face.

Iron Chef Artist Challenge

The first night after class, there was an "Iron Chef" challenge where a bunch of the instructors competed to make some interesting piece of art.  They all got a bag with essentially the same goodies in it, including a naked barbie, a weird insect, a small unfinished wood box, some kind of army man, and I forget what else. The instructors could bring some of their own materials, like paints and tools.  It was really fun to watch.  Michael DeMeng's table was mobbed most of the time, as well as Jesse Reno's. 

Here's some pics:

First, the DeMeng:

Of course, he's the first one to get the Dremel out.  I'm across the room and I hear "whiiiii!"

And already, Barbie is a mutant beetle.

With a headdress.

And let's add some quinacrodone whatever.

Some woman asked if those were boobies on the front, and he said, without pause, "Are they Barbie beetle boobies or beetle Barbie boobies?"

The horror is complete.  It's like Gregorina Mendel woke one morning...

Roxanne's demo and other students' canvases

So here's Roxanne Padgett, showing us some of her stencils.  She used both stencil brushes and makeup sponges to apply the paint.

Check out the stencils the woman is holding at the bottom of this picture--they are actually waste metal from a jeweler friend of Roxanne's.  Roxanne had a whole bunch of them and gave us each one to keep.  Mine has circles and squares and rectangles, all little like these.

Here is one of the stencils that everyone ooohed at--a two part stencil of a dress.  The finished product is one the paper, and the stencils are just above the paper, the big form has green showing through it and the detail stencil has reddish black all around it.  Pretty cool.  She showed us how you can easily do a two-part stencil by holding a desired second stencil over top of the first one and paint through both. 

This is the canvas that Roxanne was doing her demos on, and then everyone came up at some point and contributed to it--at the end of class Roxanne cut it up and gave everyone a slice.  Cool idea!

And next are a bunch of pics I took at the end of class of the canvases I liked best.

I loved this bird.  She actually made this stencil in class from the transparency and pics that Roxanne gave us.  I made a bird but it wasn't this fancy.

I love the ovals, I want to made a stencil like that.

Very cool use of the white out pen.

Nice color pallette.

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.