Wonderful Class with Diana Frey

Yesterday, I was so excited to take a class taught by the fabulous Diana Frey who is from San Luis Obispo, CA. The class was held at a great shop called Femmage in Benicia, CA.

Below is a picture of my finished necklace on the Santos bust.

Here's a close up shot.

Here's my necklace in the early stage after soldering all the metal pieces together but before I patinated it and added the embellishments.

Diana taught an easy soldering technique that made putting all the metal piece together so fun and quick.
Below are the other necklaces made in class by the other students. They were all amazing!

My sister Lana made this beautiful piece.

Made by the teacher, Diana Frey

Made by Diana Frey

If you ever get a chance to take a class with Diana, jump at it. She's a very talented artist and you learn so much from her!

A couple other items to share. I'm still enjoying taking the course, "More Sketchbook Exploration" from Lisa Congdon from the Creative Bug on-line site. Here's my drawing from her second lesson that she taught. Very simple illustrations, but it's really fun to draw and color.

I've also been buying some of her books on her line drawing, "Draw 500 Fabulous Flowers", "Botanicals", and "From The Garden" placemats (shown below).

 Below are a couple of pages from the placemats.

I love the designs and colors she uses.

I couldn't think of using the placemats for what they're really intended for so I cut up the flowers and for a personal touch added my own hand drawn stems. I glued them on a white card stock that I had glued some vintage text paper to.  There you have it fun and easy cards!

And last but not least, I wanted to share my calendar page for October. I'm subscribed to Christy Tomlinson's monthly Planner kit and used mostly her embellishments for this spread. It was really fun to decorate!

Have a great week!

Line Drawing with Lisa Congdon

I'm just loving Creative Bug, an on-line site with lots of great art classes for only $5 a month. I first signed up because Pam Garrison had a great class, Creative Sketchbooking. Just this week I watched a class from Lisa Congdon, a wonderful graphic artist. I took the More Sketchbook Exploration course. I've only watched part 1 of 4, but learned so much already!

The course is about line drawing using a black and white pen.

As you can see, I decided to use a notebook filled with handwriting as my surface, rather than a blank white page.

This is a book my daughter purchased and was put in the donate pile.

I don't think she ever read it, but when I saw it, I was thinking what a cool background those hand written pages would make and so I took it out of the donate pile and into my stash.

I love how my line drawings look on these notebook pages.

I'm not sure if I'm going to go back and add color or leave the entire book/journal black and white.

But it's been so much fun doodling in this book. The page below is inspired from Pam Garrison's Sketchbook course, but I did mine in all black and white.

I used a black brush pen I bought at Daiso (japanese dollar store), a Copic .3 black pen and white uni-ball Signo pen.

 

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the drawings, but they're really fun to make.

 

 Anyhow, these are the pages I worked on this week.

 I'm really looking forward to Part 2, 3 and 4 of Lisa's class.

Re-purposing a book into an art sketchbook is a good thing!

Binding A Deck Of Cards Into An Art Journal

If you read my last blog post, I took a wonderful class from Seth Apter, where we painted and collaged a deck of playing cards. During the actual class, I was only able to finish 10 cards, but this weekend I completed the entire deck (minus one - my deck only has 51 cards, I bought it from a thrift store).

It was so addicting collaging each one. I used a mini deck of cards, which made completing each card just a little bit quicker.

Below is a picture of the back sides.

Seth didn't bind his cards together, but I felt I would loose one if I didn't. So I used a modified Coptic binding technique that I made up to bind the cards together.

After binding, the book is about 4" long - very thick!

 I used black waxed thread to bind the cards together.

There's not many binding techniques for binding single sheets together. Normal book binding is done by creating stacks of folder papers called signatures.

I really like how it came out and now don't have to worry about loosing any of the cards. I can also turn the pages and lay them out flat, which will allow me to journal on the back sides of the cards. Seth's idea was to journal once a week on each card - filling up an entire year with one deck - so clever!
Here's some close up shots of the cards...

I sprayed a clear coat on top of the cards. I like the finish and it really protects the cards and makes it sturdier for binding too.

That was such a fun project. Thanks to Seth for a great class and Andrea for hosting it in her wonderful workshop, A Work Of Heart!

Happy Labor Day!