Art and Soul - Part 1

I'm very slow in getting this posted but better late than never as they say. Art and Soul was a blast. The classes were great, the people wonderful, hung out with family that we don't get to see very often and ate too much.

I didn't have classes the first day so after checking in at registration we went off to Latitudes for a quick visit with cousins Larie, Dick and Chaucer. Then after setting up our plans for dinner we headed up the Columbia River Gorge. It is such a beautiful trip. We stopped for a while at Multnomah Falls for some great scenery and a photo op. Then back to Portland for dinner with Larie and Dick and called it a night.

Classes

I headed over to the Embassy Suites for class on Friday morning and the first person I saw was Adrienne from CCSwaps. She was standing outside the hotel waiting for the shuttle. We just had a minute for a quick hello but I was so glad I found her without even trying. I was afraid I'd have trouble finding her. She came over from Wales to spend the week at Art and Soul and then head to Wisconsin to visit. Check out her blog for the great information on her classes at Art and Soul.

My first class was "Altered Ego" taught by Misty Mawn. We used self-portraits in our collages. I think the biggest problem everyone had was that they didn't like taking pictures of themselves or getting pictures taken. I messed up my face (I'm not a painter) but Misty fixed it for me so now it looks nice. She recommended that we use faces from magazines for practice. I'm so in awe of Misty's talent. Her demos made it look so easy. She kept telling us it took years for her to get to this point in her art and we should just keep working at it. These are some of the things I worked on:

My face (messed up by me, fixed by Misty)

My second class was with Claudine Hellmuth. The class was called Magazine Alterology. We used Citra-Solv (the concentrated version, not the diluted one in the spray bottle) and NevrDull to alter magazine pages and then used them in collages. These are the collages I did.

(Background using Citra-Solv)

(Background and figure using NevrDull)