From Photo to Fabric

Time is running out to register for the next Photo to Fabric workshop at the Southwest School of Art:

The workshop is Saturday and Sunday, June 18-19 from 10 am to 4 pm. We'll be working both with digital media and with photos as a design inspiration for paint, stamps, color palettes and composition.

Class Sessions: 2

Maximum: 10

Location: Surface Design Studio | Navarro

Take your favorite photos and use them in original fabric art - both directly printed on your own fabric and as inspiration for a fabric collage to stitch later. Bring an assortment of photos, print or digital (on disk or flash drive) to the first class in order to select those that work best with each technique. You'll learn to make two different kinds of photo prints on fabric using an inkjet printer, and also enlarge, simplify and transfer a photograph to a larger wall fabric art quilt format, for later quilting or stitch work at home. Please see SSA website for a materials list. Bring a lunch each day.

The Workshop of the Mind

How does your mind work? And what might it look like? Answering these two questions can give any (creative) person (and we are all creative) interesting insight into his or her process of invention, collection and creation.

 Led by my colleague, Dr. Cynthia Herbert, we traveled the road of looking at one's mind at a recent workshop at Ballet Austin. Attending were about 18 arts educators from diverse arts organizations (and/or interests) who took our New World Kids training. This exercise takes adult through a very personal image/collage/sculpture making process based on what currently is known about how the mind perceives, uses and stores information -- and how each of us differently uses that information to create new "products." Products can be as complex as full-blown works or art, as business plans, as research designs -- or as simple as a room arrangement, a lesson plan, a travel plan, a meal.

I'll be leading the same activity in my play and imagination workshop later this summer at El Cielo Studio, and also a parents' version at my weeklong course on creativity for your kids at the Southwest School in August. (There is also a Southwest School of Art weekend course there for teachers on teaching fiber arts, but we will start with this mind=picture activity.) 

PLAY, ART AND ATTENTION

July 29-31

Making time to play with odd-ball materials; learning to focus upon artful tasks at hand -- sounds like opposite sides of the coin? At this exploratory and full-of-play weekend, we’ll explore the relationship between the time, play, art and focus. Where does time management intersect with open-hearted fun? Expect bubbles, playdough, sparklers, jello, yoga and seeing the world from new angles and attitudes. Fee $165, including most supplies and meals. (For details, email me through the contact form on the sidebar).

special parent class

on raising creative kids

9-955|CREATIVITY & YOUR KIDS

Susie Monday

Mon – Fri, Aug 1 – 5 | 9:00am – 12:00pm 

Tuition: $140 (Members: $125) | 5 sessions

Discover more about your child’s learning. Explore their world of creativity, and find ways to stimulate and enhance it. With artist-educator Susie Monday, co-author of New World Kids: The Parent’s Guide to Creative Thinking as your guide, find out how to support, direct, and defend your child’s creative thinking at home and in their school setting. Hands-on activities, handouts, problem-solving, and an interdisciplinary approach characterize this invaluable class for the parents of creative kids.

sAug 1 – 5 | 9:00am – 12:00pm Tuition: $140 (Members: $125) | 5 sessions

But here's one little taste that might provide insight (this is actually the final part of the 2 hour experience).

Think of a metaphor or analogy for your mind at work on a creative project, big or small. For example -" my mind is like a bee hive with bees and different tasks buzzing and communicating," or My mind is an assembly line where sensory input goes in at one end, gets organized and reshaped and comes out the other," or "My mind is story telling stage with lots of storytellers taking turns."

Now create a model or drawing of that analogy or idea! This is even more fun in a group, because you will be amazed at the diversity of ideas and of their expresssion.

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How to Make Your Mark in Your Work Work

What are the  marks you make with your work? Do you have symbols, shapes, lines or an approach with color and pattern that you integrate into your art, no matter the exact "content" or "theme" or story? Can your audience see your hand in your work? What a human thing to do. What a connection making such marks is to our amazing history of being human...

Markmaking is our language, private, personal, universal and iconic. The marks we make over and over in our work -- be it visual, kineasthetic, tactile, audible -- constitutes a piece of our personal unique style, and the more we work at those marks, finding mastery of our own special language, the more distinctive is our work, the more recognizable. 

Markmaking is part of style, part of voice, part of what makes my work, my work and yours, yours. Taking time to find, polish, elaborate upon, distill and play with our marks is an important aspect of finding our voice in the medium we choose to use to express our ideas.

The Mark-Making Workshop at El Cielo Studios is coming up in about a week and a half  (June 10, 11,12). I'm hoping to fill this little extra slot with a few folks who want to take the time to find and polish and master their own set of marks for fiber art prints, applique and other surface design. While the activities are designed with fiber artists in mind, they are also of value to any mixed media or visual medium who would like his or her work to become more distinctive and distinctly unique.

Markmaking is a distinctly human activity and one that we have been exploring as humans for millenia. Consider the new documentary by Wilhelm Herzog, Cave of the Forgotten Dreams.  We just saw the film (in 3-D) at Austin's Violet Crown Cinema, a new and snazzy space downtown on 2nd.  This adventure (part of Linda's and my CAMP AUSTIN this week) was stunningly beautiful, evocative and a powerful reminder of what it is to be human, to make marks and to leave our handprint behind.

The week in Austin is also work time for me. I'm part of the New World Kids' Training Team that is working at Ballet Austin with arts educators from three different arts organizations in the city. We, too, are looking at markmaking (among other expressive tools) as teachers move and paint and sound their way through the Sensory Alphabet. Seeing the differences in our minds at work as they play out on the page is just another dimension of this markmaking work. I'll share more about the workshops later this week on the blog, but meanwhile, here are a few playfull markmaking experiments to fool around with:

1. Look at how you doodle. What kinds of lines and shapes and symbols do you play with "when noone is looking?"

2. Take one kind of simple symbol and play it out across a wide variety of media -- paint it, draw it, make it in clay, look for and photograph it in nature and on the streets, sing it, rattle it, make it move. make it into a movie, write it into a story.

3. Carve or cut or otherwise create a stamp of a favorite mark of symbol. Experiment with it on fabric and paper, with repetition and size, change the scale and layer it one upon another. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

4. Look at a favorite artists' Insert Image work and see if you can find examples of marks made over and over. How are these distinctive marks part of the artist's "fingerprint?"

5. Make a slide show of images of a mark or symbol or sign or shape that is interesting to you. How many places can you find it? How many ways can you make it show up?

6. Try your mark in electronic media and on software apps that allow for special kinds of markmaking. Print out these marks and see how they could be used in your work.

Some to try: Zen Brush:

 

Also: Finger Sketch Paint

Express Sketchbook

OR, you can come out to El Cielo Studio next week and do these and many similar activities with the group!

CHANGE OF DATE

MARKMAKING,

MAKING YOUR MARK

June 10-12

Markmaking can be what distinguishes one person's

work on paper or fabric or any medai from another's -

their personal style. Using color, line, shape, rhythm

and textures, students will explore traditional and new

media as well as techniques for personal markmaking.

Techniques to be covered include deconstructed

screenprinting, stamping, using paint

sticks and monoprinting with gelatin plates. No matter

what your experience level, you'll gain confidence

in working with layered media and find your

strongest media for the marks that make your work

unmistakably your own.  

$160 plus accommodations, free to $30 for both nights, Friday night potluck is optional but encouraged!

Illustration Workshop with the Maestros

 

Today twenty Central American teachers are at El Cielo for the first of four design workshops. Today, we looked at several children's books (they will be making their own later in the summer), and at how the artist's had worked in different and varied styles. Like many adults some of the teachers are shy about their ability to draw --- though I think they have fewer reservations than most Norte Americanos I know!

 

One of the great books I shared was Faith Ringgold's Tar Beach, with illustrations similar to those that she used on her amazing and groundbreaking art quilt Tar Beach, made in 1988. The story combines autobiography and fictional narrative, and the pictures are delightful, as is the story. (Photo above from the Brooklyn Museum)

ANd here are my illustrators. Each teacher had to produce four versions of an illustration of an event from his or her childhood. THey worked in paper collage, magazine collage, ink and watercolor, crayon/oil pastel resist. We discussed their strongest style, what was most fun, most challenging. Next Friday we'll do a printmaking workshop that works with the same narrative images.