Teaching Collage Backgrounds and Artistic Recycling!!

I have recently joined a Mixed Media Art Group in Fredericksburg , VA. Each member is asked to contribute a workshop or demo or lecture at least once a year. This past Thursday and Saturday mornings I held a messy play/demo/class creating unique collage backgrounds. The members of this group work with a wide variety of different media, many of the artists stick quite firmly to their chosen art form. They are not mixed media atists, not yet anyway. Then there are some of us, like Darlene and myself who have a very difficult, if not impossible, time staying within a single medium.!!!

I taught my favorite collaged and paint scraped technique (like the picture above) and then finished off with my painted paper towel technique as we had palettes of paint that simply COULD NOT BE WASTED!!! I also discussed working with and painting, used dryer sheets and old discarded texts for collage purposes, hence the "recycle " in my blog title!!!

This is Donna scraping away with her fancy palette knife( recycled gift card). She finished off her wonderful blue and lavendar piece with a dusting of glitter! Donna is the gal that gave us the wonderful needle felting lesson taht I blogged about last month!! She is a wonderfully energetic and enthusiastc artist!!


Ruth walked in the door not knowing a soul and got swept away by my painting enthusiasm before I even let her introduce herself. I must give new folks a chance to get their feet wet before I mow them down with a flood of messy techniques. She assured us that she would return to future meetings!!

Ariel and Carol created these two very colorful backgrounds and went on to paint some wonderful paper towels with the left over paint!! Ariel is the wonderful Water Colorist who led the water color workshop and held my hand through my first water color painting experience. You can read all about that and see my watercolor painting in a post from two months ago. Ariel has a wonderful new web site that you can see here: http://www.artbyariel.com. I am planning on taking a class from Ariel in May, in which she will teach us how to paint floral images!! I am so excited!!

And here is our fearless leader, Darlene, who kept us laughing and happy the whole time. She has lots of experience with similar techniques but is a great one for jumping in to anything that is good and messy!! She could spend the whole year teaching us all of the different art techniques that she knows. She is a very talented lady with an amazing body of work!! I am so thrilled to have met her through this wonderful new group!

Here is Darlene again with her apainted paper towel. She said that she used paper towels all the time that she had used for clean ups but she had not specifically set out to paint paper towels to bwe used in collage work. Everyone puts their own mark or twist on things and that is why sharing of even familiar techniques is so much fun. There is always someting new to learn!!!!


I got some wonderful feedback from all of the participants and an invitation to think about teaching some classes at the Fine Arts Center in the future!! Cool, eh????