Art and Soul - Story Fragments

Thomas' English muffins paper dolls
Originally uploaded by lemonade_sandwich.

So I actually took very few pics at Art and Soul, too busy making stuff! I will have more of my own artwork soon, I hope, but in the meantime I show off some of the paperdolls I made as trades. I traded them all!

Day 2's class was Lesley Riley's Story Framgments class. I admit that I was less sure about how I was going to like this class. I already work with a lot of the techniques, so it was going to be a matter of how this particular project settled with me. Lesley also specifically wanted us to bring pictures of heads, to make a person with an accompanying story. I'm not really big on representing people in my artwork (other than Michelle, which I didn't really want to do for this one.) After much agonizing, I found a photo I took at the Bronx Zoo of an elephant sculpture that I thought would work well.

We spent the morning painting our fabric - very fun and freeing. While it dried we started to plan out our figures. The elephant worked out great. I ended up giving her a tiered skirt, and her story somehow involves flying coffee cups. An elephant also freed me from worrying too much about proportion, since she's already not a person. We attached everything with wonder under. I think I will need to go back and add some stitching to hold some parts more securely. I didn't get far enough to write my story on, and her skirt still needs some stitching. I'm really pleased with how she came out. A photo will follow ASAP.

I suspect that Lesley has not had a lot of people do a non-human figure before, and she definitely gave it a thumbs up. She was a good teacher. The techniques aren't hard, but she had a really helpful hand-out giving some basics of human proportion that were really useful. Its interesting to see that while many elements were repeated (a lot of people had a tree) there are so many variations. There were some very nice women to chat with as well, and I definitely didn't have the "fitting-in" problems that I was feeling on Friday night,. Whew! You can see the work of some of the other artists in the class on my Flickr account. I, of course, did not make a note of anyone's names, so can't give full credit unless the artists want to jump in!

Saturday after class my sister and I joined a group she had fallen in with at the Manager's reception. A margarita and many trades soon followed, along with a really nice conversations with lots of new people. Any inability on part to remember more specific details we'll just chalk up to that margarita. We decided we would wait for after vendor night to get dinner, and went off to go shopping.

Vendor night shopping was interesting. The booths of emphemera and collage things we mostly passed by, since our favorite way of acquiring such items is to go through our parent's garage. Plus, the prices are a lot lower in the garage. We enjoyed looking at the artist booths mostly. Seeing the artwork of some of the instructors made us want to go and sign up for their classes next time. Paul Johnson, a book artist, had some absolutely amazing pop-up books, a small one with a story involving a house (my personal totem these days) and a princess (Michelle's obsession) just jumped out at me. I would definitely look for one of his classes sometime, although he is from the UK, so I don't know how often he teaches here. We also picked out a bird sculpture from Stephanie Lee that we were sure our Mom would love for mother's day. (It turns out we were wrong, but that's for another day.) Another teacher to add to my list for next time. I also couldn't resist a clothes-line of little wax dipped dresses from Pamela Huntington. Sarah took a class with her on Monday and had nothing but raves about her as a teacher and a person. The dresses were so sweet and had a cute story about peanut butter sandwiches. Sarah was taken in by one of Sally Jean Alexander's charms. I will have more to say about Sally Jean later, since I spent the next 2 days in her class.

I think dinner that followed will deserve its own separate post, as it was an adventure unto itself.