Strathmore workshop do-over and a cupcake

I know I've mentioned before that I've been wanting to take a class with Pam Carriker forever and I was so excited about this Strathmore class and I've been disappointed. HOWEVER. I think the only way to give it a fair chance is to stick it out.

So, I posted a few pages that weren't horrible, but I made them horrible not very long after that. I thought I was following Pam's steps, but I actually skipped the charcoal step and when I tried to use charcoal after adding oil pastels and a gesso wash, the charcoal pencil was peeling away the gesso and a layer of matte medium I'd put on after the gesso. Naturally, I got mad first, but then when I had a similar thing happen with my Ugly Me page, I figured out that it's the oil pastel making that happen - it doesn't bond with the matte medium, or gesso, or anything, so when I try to use something over it that's scratchy like a pencil, everything peels right off down to the oil pastel layer. So I re-watched the Pam videos and she used charcoal THEN oil pastel, then gesso. Got it. Started over.
She's not horrible, but I don't love her, either. We'll see if I can make something good out of her.

This is me having a cupcake at Kelly's because she said once I got 30 blog followers, we were having cupcakes!!

Then she suggested having her mom and sister follow me just to get cupcakes, but we didn't have to resort to that. Thanks, Jess, for being number 30! It's kind of amazing to think there are 30 people who want to read my silly rambles. I hope I'm at least occasionally entertaining.

Award and Strathmore class

Joyce gave me a blog award!! It's pretty exciting because there are so many creative blogs out there, and she picked ME! I'm pretty thrilled, but not quite thrilled enough to repost it here. I'm just not a reposter or a forwarder.

My Strathmore class pages are looking worse than ever. I swear I did what Pam said - collaged, iol pastels, gesso wash. Yuck.

This one is NO WHERE NEAR this bright in real life. The picture looks a LOT better than it really looks!!

This one is the least awful of the bunch.

I thought this would be cool with the angel who's wanting to fly and the broken girl with one wing, but I dunno if it actually is cool or if it's just ugly.


And this one has too much background space, but I just don't HAVE a bunch of scraps ready to collage because of two things: one, I hate collage and am terrible at it and two, I throw things away. I am a purger. I love throwing things away. Scraps leftover from a project go in the trash.

I tossed out the scraps from making Fabriano journals when Kelly wasn't looking because I knew she wouldn't let me, but she rescued them after I left her house! We make an excellent team, don't we? :)

Anyway, I'm going to re-watch the Strathmore videos to see if there's anything I can do to these pages to make them better, but don't hold your breath.

Sleepover!

Do people outgrow sleepovers? I think some people probably do, especially people who don't have friends from childhood. Rarely does one adult say to another "You wanna spend the night at my house?" like children do. That being said, me and Liam spent the night at Kelly's last night. It was good times! She has crazy boys and I have a crazy boy and they mostly entertain each other when we toss them together. I like it!

Kelly and I are taking the Strathmore Visual Journal classes (they're free) and the first teacher is Pam Carriker. I was SO EXCITED - a FREE class with Pam Carriker, what could be better?!? Then the class started and I've been SUPER disappointed. I really don't WANT to make copies of my old journal pages and cut out the focal image to glue on another page. Why can't I just draw a new focal image? BUT...I've given in. For my overnight play date with Kelly, I printed some of my old stuff (times two) for us to play with and we collaged.

Then, Kelly's youngest son and Mini Me decided they wanted to collage, too! How cute is that??

Evolution of a Pam page

OK, I really didn't think I could do this. (Maybe I can't, it's still too early to tell.) But I really like this page so far and I wanted to share it with you! It's taken FOREVER. Hours. I started this one last week at Kelly's. (I posted it then, I think)

Then I COLLAGED! (Please be proud, you know I'm a horrible collager. Collagist?) And over the collage I stamped a little more. (Pam says.)

Here it is with charcoal added around the collage elements. I'm not sure if I like the charcoal yet, but that's what Pam would do.
I'm happy with how this one is going so far. The others, not so much, but that's a story for another day...

Collage (more Pam Project)

I've been trying really hard to do this correctly. People will say things like "There's no mistakes in art" and "happy accident" and "don't think too hard about it" and blah, blah, blah, but those are NOT things I believe. If I make a mark I don't like in my art, I erase it. Sometimes I have to "erase" using paint. No problem. Lots of people can collage fast and furious and things look wonderful or if they DON'T look wonderful, they have a way to make it look wonderful. One of the reasons I suck at collage is because I'm not interested in those strange, unsmiling old people. I'm just not. Sorry. You don't scrapbook strangers, why would you make art out of strangers? I also don't understand the obsession with eggs and birds and butterflies. My word is trains and legos and How to Train Your Dragon and Mr. Men books. Not butterflies and eggs. So working in this way is difficult for me. BUT if The Tessha Project taught me anything, it's that if I don't give up at the first sign on "this makes me uncomfortable" then I can sometimes make something I like!

These first two I painted under Kelly's careful instruction - at her house, with her guiding me every step of the way and in Pam's colors.The bat is (naturally) my favorite part. But I'm pretty OK with the rest of it, too. It's not horrible. (Maybe you think it is, but I'm sort of liking it.)

So far, just a door and a butterfly here. Baby steps.

Here I have a clock and a car - probably not what Pam would do, but it's still her process, right? And in the upper right corner, that's a napkin from Caribou Coffee.

This is Rylee, she lives next door to me and I gave her a flower, a butterfly and a piece of music paper torn out of a church bulletin (no the church did NOT burn down while I was inside it).
Pam says "collage around the edges until you're happy with it" but I'm too nervous to collage anymore today. It's ridiculous, I'm a grown woman and you'd think the matte medium was going to attack me I'm so nervous about collaging. Really, what's the WORST thing that's going to happen? But I just get really nervous! AFTER I had all these little tiny things in place I remembered that Pam usually places all of her collage, THEN glues it down. Maybe next time I'll try that.

SLACKER!!

Nope, I'm not screaming that at you guys - I missed yesterday! I was doing SO GOOD with my posting, and then yesterday just got away from me! I had a cupcake and coffee for breakfast, followed by some REALLY exciting news that took a couple of hours to get all worked out and I spent the rest of the day trying to calm down from all the excitement. I was so freaked out I couldn't make the journal page for week two of the group I'm leading and LOOK WHAT I DID:

That's right, I COLLAGED. I need someone to be proud. OK, Kelly's proud but could you guys be proud, too? Look at the cute picture and the music paper doesn't look bad. But now I've been struck with PPS. You're supposed to collage MORE (because that's what Pam would do and this is her month) but I'm really afraid of f-ing it all up. I gotta get over it, I know, but I'm just so awful at collage...

The Masters Project: Month 2

Pam Carriker! I can't afford to take a class with her, but Kelly and I are going to spend January studying her style and figuring out what Pam would do. Here are some pictures from our play date today.

It's paint and stamps and more stamps. Some embossing and texture-making.

I'm afraid of Pam for some reason, so I tried to get a bunch of pages done at Kelly's before I had to come home and handle it by myself. And you know what the next step is?

COLLAGE!! You know I'm a collage retard - Kelly said so.

Luckily this one still needs some stamping.

And this one! This one might be my favorite so far - until I wreck it with collage, of course.

I'm going to spend some time tonight watching Pam tutorials on YouTube so I can get int he Pam mood. WWPD?

Make another journal, of course!

I've been trying to decide what I want to do about the Pam Carriker class I'm taking that starts this week. Since it's given by Strathmore, you'd think I should use one of their journals. BUT I don't have the one Pam is going to use, I only have Britsol ones (4 of them in various sizes...) and when Ajae sent me the one I'm now using for Manga, my first thought was "Yay, I'll use this for Pam's class!" but that was very quickly followed by "Heck no, I wanna draw in it TODAY, and it's my favorite paper, and I'm going to use it for Manga." Case closed. So (you needed those babbling thoughts, trust me) I've been trying to find them online because the only place around here where you can get them is in St. Paul which is about 20 minutes away and you have to park on the street which I'm not comfortable with so I always park at a grocery store and walk several blocks but it's 37 degrees and raining (this is not good because of the huge piles of snow that are going to melt and then freeze later, making the roads into an ice skating rink for your car) and I have Mini Me - who would not appreciate a sprint in the rain. And I realized the journals are kind of expensive for a class. I mean $14 is not so much for a journal, less than I pay for my beloved Moley, but what if I start playing the Pam Way and I hate it? Then the journal sits on a shelf for the next fifty years and Liam throws it away after I'm dead. I decided instead to make journals for me and for Kelly so we have something already done that we didn't spend any money on and that way if we hate it, we can just chuck it in the trash. (Yes, I often toss my art in the trash if I hate it. It's just how I roll.)

So, this is just file folders sewn together:I used patterned cardstock for the covers, just glued it onto the first and last folders.

Added some decorative tape to the bound edge.

And this is the backs! (Or fronts. No right or wrong here.)

I don't know why I took this picture of it open, but apparently I needed it, so I might as well show you. The pages are 10x7 inches. I'm thinking this is my "perfect" journal size. We'll see.