Exploring Altered Books: Begins August 7

Altered books have become great muti-media adventures. Start with a book whose title titillates you, remove pages and glue other pages together, make doors and windows and pockets and paint and stamp and collage and add charms and ribbons and lace and fibers and find poems and...and...and...well, you can see how this becomes a many-paged mini canvas for your creative artist expression. I have books if you don't have one to begin, or if you have already started and want to do more, bring your own. I have some broken safety glass (which breaks up small like crystals) and want to carve into the cover and lay some mosaics in the craters I've created (I've never seen this done, but in my mind it "rocks"...lol). Make one for yourself, or make a themed one for someone you love and give it to them for Christmas (not tooooo early to be thinking along those lines). I'm holding this class at the request of Melissa White, a student of mine from a "dream home" class. This will be an evening class beginning August 7th, and there are 5 vacancies left at this time, so let me know early if you'd like to join us. sheilakelly@cox.net

Monoprints and their ghosts - March Workshop

We'll spend the our Saturday Workshop this month on the 3rd Saturday, March 16, creating and pulling monoprints off several kinds of foundations: glass, freezer paper, homemade gelli blocks. This is a messy and most fun process, and can be altered several ways to provide different results every time. We'll string up drying lines, and we'll use some of our day's production for a simple end project. I have aprons for everyone, but dress comfortably in painter's garb!

March classes 5, 12, 19

March day classes are on Tuesdays this month!

This month's class will focus on altering found, handmade and commercially designed papers to use in our collages along with the magazine images we so dearly love. We'll use gesso, gels, paints and inks with things found around the studio to make marks and lay down layers of color and texture to use in future collage projects. The classes always begin with a timed collage...some time to gather, then timed to keep the fingers moving with as little interference from the critical mind as possible. The classes close with sharing our work, either from the class or from home. Hope to see you there! As shown in the "schedule of classes" on the right side, we begin at 9:45 and end at noon.

Far Destination Fantasy--February Workshop

Although there will not be a Saturday Workshop Challenge in January, the subject of February 23rd's Workshop Challenge is FAR DESTINATION FANTASY, a drift into our imaginations about a distant, exotic place in time or space or story. Are the colors cool or warm? What shapes dominate this place? What symbols and subjects and architecture abound here? What is the story line? I googled exotic destinations just to see what came up...good beginnings, but just beginnings.

We'll be learning about image transfers (yes, Virginia, Sheila can do image transfers!), layering, and trying out different gel and soft, matt and glossy mediums. We will begin with a pre-gessoed hard book cover (several sizes to choose from provided). The small class size (4-6 plus me) allows for plenty of investigation and discovery. Remember, the studio has an abundance of magazines, found and altered papers, coloring mediums, and stamping and inking tools. You are invited to bring your own favorite collage tools, or come empty handed...you won't leave empty-handed!

Looking forward to a day of collaging with you! sheilajkelly@gmail.com

Happy Holy and Holly Days!

As this year ends, my 91-year old dad and my 89-year old mom are completing the move to their “retirement” home, the home of my baby sister, Karen. I've spent the year running (okay, driving) back and forth to DeRidder to help in all the preparations, and now can see the address change at the end of the tunnel! I know they will enjoy living at their youngest daughter's home and being under her care!

So now it is time to re-turn my attention to classes and workshops in my home studio. I want to begin in January, the best beginning for a new, good year. Those of you who have been champing at the bit to take classes this last year (you know who you are), and those of you who have given up thinking you would be able to study with me (you know who YOU are), LET'S GO!

This year we'll be opening our minds and hands to papers and techniques beyond magazines and cutting and pasting (yea, we'll still do that, but MUCH MORE). Just glancing at this upcoming new year, we see some of the following techniques and projects: altering papers with burning, layering and stamping; making our own stamps; making a palette of favorite colors and color combinations; working with gesso (white, black and clear) and resists; and making handmade papers of all sorts. We'll discuss end-of-month workshop projects during class, so the workshops can use our new skills and further us along our individual creative paths.

Please see my "2013 teaching schedule" for information you will need to participate. 

My hardiest wishes for a creative and productive new year!

Blogging OR Arting...that is the question.

Okay, so I want to be creating art more than I want to be typing on a blog...and I can't seem to make my hands or my head do both. I have posted some new stuff, especially the pendants and the dream homes, but found this site and thought you might want to go there and look around, get inspired, get ready and get going! More later, and as usual, wishing you inspiration and realization.

Art outside the box

We are blessed to have the internet and so many artists who are willing to share ideas with us, such as how-to's and ways-to-recycle-these-and-those. And we are cursed with this same vast network of resources as well, as I discovered after developing an idea for a new and unexplored focus on collage yesterday. I even took notes: what are the parameters of this focus, how can I share this idea in a new class next year here at Studio 745, what is the best way to present the finished collages. It seemed to me to be art outside the box.

Then, for some unknown reason, I googled the name I had given the collage focus: haiku collage. And yep, it's been done. The name is there. And yes, perhaps everything we can think of has already been 'thunk of'. So now the project grows a bit: how to think outside the box someone has already been drawing inside of.

I'm both sorry I looked at what others have called haiku collage, and encouraged by it. The development of  haiku collages I have in mind differs somewhat from what the two or three other people online have done. But it's more difficult to not think of the color green after someone has said the word than to "think up" what the color green just might look like. I won't look again at their versions of haiku collages. It was somehow the opposite of "inspirational" for me.

Wishing you inspiration and realization in your art.