Artiscape: Jacqueline Sullivan - Watermedia Sampler

Jacqueline Sullivan is a wonderful teacher -- I've taken a couple of different lasses with her before and she's always been very thorough. Her Artiscape class didn't disappoint.

Titled Watermedia Sampler, it was similar to Barbara Close's in terms of painting background pages and using a variety of techniques to affect the final product.

One of the differences, though, is that rather than using watercolor, she had us prepare a highly diluted acrylic, using water and tube-acrylics. They are mixed in small water bottles with sports caps on them.

Then the fun begins -- using a cookie sheet, you wet your paper, squirt color on the page.

Then you add another -- generally up to three. Let them bleed or run together.

We did eight pages -- seven of which used this technique. On each of those pages (using 300 watercolor paper as the substrate) we used a variety of "add-ons": kosher salt, sand, a mixture of the two, powders, charcoal and pastels scraped into a fine powder using a razor blade, alcohol, lace paper, Rit dye.

On the eighth sheet, we made a design in Tar Gel. Later we painted the area around this design and using a gold or copper foil (similar to Jones-Tones), we ironed over the tar gel, leaving the metallic. (The page below has Rit Dye and gold powder.)

After that we made a book with samples of each page.

Well, some of the folks made a book. I was stumped with the binding and I didn't finish mine in class, but here it is now!

I have to say I had a great deal of fun in this class, although I think they overfilled it considering the size of the room. (I thought that about Barbara Close's class as well. This conference needs larger workspaces for the type of work we were doing.)

That said, I will most definitely do this technique again and look forward to using the papers I made. There are lots of applications for the "final pieces" -- backgrounds for mixed media collage, tags, cards, and even as accent pieces.

Just work in an area where you can make a big mess and have lots of room to dry your stuff! (A hotel room wasn't quite the spot!)

Artiscape: Barbara Close - Paper Textures

My first half-day class was with the wonderful Barbara Close. Titled "Paper Textures," it focused on watercolor as the coloring source, with a variety of items used to texture the paper and add depth to the colors.

We started with four sheets of watercolor paper, folded in half, so we had 16 pages or eight spreads to work with.

We painted all the pages, and while wet did a number of techniques to give them some life.

Included were stamping techniques (linoleum block with or without design), powders, pastel (wet down) and more. This is a swath of pastel, then watered, on a watercolor background.

Sometimes she used odd bits as a stamp -- these marks were made with a corrugated Starbucks drink holder all folded into a square or circle.

And here she's working with the linoleum block.

This is what it looks like on the page.

When done, we put our books together in a cover and stitched them up. Barbara showed us how to judge and place the holes for the awl...

And the stitch the binding.

I learned a lot in this class. You'll note, I'm not showing you my grand book! Well, maybe later! I did some pages I adored. And a few that -- well, let's just call them gross violations of the color wheel! So, I think I'm not done playing with it yet!

But I will say I will do this again -- and use the papers for books or cards. And, this class went well with my afternoon class, which you'll hear about next!

(New at Chopsticks and String: Anne Frank in Words and Pictures.)