Hi all! I'm sitting here loving the peace and quiet. The girls are at their dad's house and hubby is watching Lost. (I never can get into that show because it takes so dang long to find out what's going to happen next! )
I'd love to share a few things in my journal. I posted the links to these two books on my right column. The first one, Fabric Art Journals by Pam Sussman, is something I bought myself after my art class on Friday. This book is absolutely amazing!!! I'm not much of a fabric artist but this book makes me want to be. If you like fabric, you've gotta get it. It shows patterns and project ideas for complete fabric journals as well as paper journals with a fabric cover. Total inspiration and total eye candy!
Thursday night I ventured out to meet a friend for dinner. We went to the new Cheesecake Factory, wowza, what a gorgeous restaurant. We had appetizers and raspberry martinis and caught up on everything. She recommended the second book, Where Women Create by Jo Packham. It features studios of some awesome artists and is totally on my wish list. After dinner we shopped around at the mall and of course the bookstore didn't have it in stock.
I spent the next three days (friday-sunday 9:30am to 3:30pm) taking the watercolor/mixed media workshop I talked about below. The first two days were awesome....I think that by the 3rd day I was out of my element. You have to realize that I spent 75% of my life at home (actually, probably 95% but that makes me sound like a real weirdo). I'm a total homebody. After class, my sweet friend
Lenall (she's the one who talked me into taking this workshop...she'd been signed up since August!) and I would goof off....shop, eat, etc. By Sunday, I was just a veg....not good since this was the day we were doing painting techniques on actual watercolor paper. I am not a water colorist and I've learned the reason is that I can never seem to get what I want when working on paper. The first two classes were working on different surfaces...(I can't remember the first one, but it was a huge sheet of plastic....then clay board and watercolor canvas. These surfaces are much more forgiving, allowing me to dab away something I paint that I just don't care for....not so with the paper. It started out okay....I sketched out what I wanted to paint, after browsing through watercolor books that Ruth brought along with her...looking through her clip art and photos...I basically just farted around while everyone else got started. After puttering most of the morning, I finally made a sketch....started playing around and in a short time, was telling myself...."don't worry, you can always fix it with pastels and prisma color pencils." By 2pm or so, I felt like throwing the painting across the room, wadding it up, stomping up and down on it. The class was the perfect size of 6 students, we all had a couple of tables to spread out on and since I'm used to doing art alone, I didn't even considering asking the instructor for help. She heard my comment of..."This is why I don't paint...it's frustrating and I hate it." She came over and told me that I should have called her way before I reached the point of tears...(I told her not to be nice to me or I'd start crying)....so frustrated! She worked her magic on the painting but I was through for the day. I know it wasn't the painting that took me over the edge, that I've been pretty volatile lately, had been going nonstop for several says and was just tired. The next day, Monday, was my appointment with Susan. I'd gone 2 weeks from my last visit and when I got to her office I felt wiped. Kem and I had started packaging and boxing up the Artists' orders of Art4aCure cards....I'd been putting this off, the very idea of it caused me such stress and grief...hubby carefully got me going and we've been working on them for the last few days. I'm so ready to have them done, to be caught up on everything, to feel less emotional. oxox
