Art Class Notes, Class 6

Well, this was my final art class and Diana was bound and determined for us to "have something" for the Student Teacher Exhibit in the gallery. This worked out well for our final class because it enabled us to take a lot of what we had been learning for the session and put it into practice. That might not seem like much, but experimenting with lots of products and processes separately, not in an actual piece of art, is quite a different animal than actually putting it into practice with a piece you care about.

So, this class was mostly about coming up with an image or images on the spur of the moment and turning it into something. It was fun, and I do believe I learned a lot by doing this. Abstract techniques started to gel into something workable.

A few notes on the process......

• I started by just ripping out images I liked from magazines. The really didn't have to match or mean anything, just be something I liked. I came up with a handful and then chose the ones I really liked more than the others. Again, they pretty much weren't related, but I would work on that.
• Then, I painted the background of the painting, a bit of green, etc. nothing too great, just background.
• I started adding in some images with paint, circle, stars...things I didn't mind if I painted over, etc, just stuff. I also added some paper that had been painted earlier and that I had ripped into shapes. This was paper that Diana brought to class, phone book pages painted and layered with the medium (like the tissue) or just painted. One of the cool, and dangerous for a pack rat, things about this class was seeing how just about anything can be painted and used in a mixed media painting. You can paint tissue paper, brown paper bags, advertisements, phone book pages, sales circulars, anything really. The sky's the limit! Paint it all!! Stock pile it all in hopes of painting it! Oh, no, skip that part.
• So, laying in paper, repainting, etc, magazine images in there, and the whole thing is coming together a bit, Then I started painting borders around these images. That really made them look a part of the painting as opposed to just being like a collage, floating around in there somewhere. Dabbing paint here and there, highlighting, etc. I added some cheese cloth, put it in with soft gel medium, painted a bit of white luminescent paint, pink....leaving it in for the texture.
• Just keep tweaking and adding, blending until it feels like a cohesive something. Good luck on that last part, it's the hard one. It'll happen, so stick with it.

That's pretty much what we did for the class. It was a good one. I'm not sure if I ended up with something that will go in the exhibit, I guess it's this or maybe the chickadees. I let you know.

The whole session was good, it was one of my favorites and I'm sad it's all over. I really enjoyed it, the whole class, the creative time, painting again. Diana was great and she brings fun and play to her work and her classes. She's thoughtful and intentioned, but playful and I really like that mix for myself too. I'm so glad I did it.