Paint Under My Nails

FIRST things first, we show the "Grandman," the best looking grandchild in the world. Just ask my daughter, the grandmother. Yes ... that, er, makes me the great-grandmother. Life is stranger than fiction (or something like that).
Saturday I was out shopping for art supplies and Sunday (today) I was at Art & Soul from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. using the supplies. I took Katie Kendrick's class, "Every Face Tells A Story."
What a place Art & Soul is, with rooms full of people creating wonderful things, treasures, gifts and new careers, I'll bet.
The hallway was full of women in aprons but no one was cooking food. Everyone was cooking up Art!
There was transformational painting, "Skulls, Wings & Rusty Things," "Funky Found Object Canvas Village," Tiny Treasure, Spinning Bead Pendant and lots more. And there are classes tomorrow, too. Oh, don't think calling in sick and getting a hotel room didn't come into my pea brain! Maybe next year I will do four classes in four days. I could eat for two days on the turkey club sandwiches from the hotel. I hear that Nov. 7-11 they are doing four days at the Inn at Spanish Head. Not many spaces left though.
So, what did we paint? Katie asked us to bring Ampersand claybord and it was great to work on. Gosh, I felt almost professional. She also wanted us to bring high contrast printed pictures of faces.
Here is my first picture from Google hosted Life magazine photos. We used light, medium and dark values of collage materials ripped from magazines to lay down for texture and then painted over them.
I was having fun with this one for quite a while. She was "speaking" to me and my fingers were covered with gesso and acrylic paint. It was like a pair of gloves! Then the fun stopped. I became self conscious and she got a bit testy, not liking anything I was doing to her. Fortunately Katie's method includes working on two or more projects at a time and so we all began another picture.
This time it was supposed to be mostly paint. Water-soluable crayons were used and stabilo pencils and sometimes a little collage. I didn't use a photo for this one, but just drew a face on my own.
You'll have to look sideways at this one. It forgot to rotate it and I'm too lazy to stop and do that now. I had big trouble with this one, so after Katie finished a "demo," I stood in line for help.
Here she is showing a bunch of different methods - transfers, stamping, shading and magic. She just jabs brushes into this paint and a little bit of that and they take on magic colors. The outlines on the faces she paints are just amazing. To watch them transform in front of you is like watching time lapse photography. Practice, practice, practice. That's all it takes. Well, not strictly all.
So after she took a hand in helping me with my face and the story it had to tell, this is what showed up in the hallway for our group show. (Mine is No. 2 and 3, both in the middle.)
I tell you what, I was going to show them all to you, but it is 9 p.m. and there's a workday tomorrow and more painting if I get home on time. We'll talk painting then, OK? - femminismo