Last class today till Jan 2012

I can't believe how fast this class has gone by...I know I've been work the students pretty hard, though I have more advanced student than new I feel challenging them is a good thing.  We will see how things go. I always start them off with a collage time of 30 minutes to get all the misc. out and communicated with each other from week that has past and then be centered for the class session...I've tried to introduce a few ways to approach the canvas or the Darn White surface.

One way was to create in a sketch book a few collage sketches and then take one of them and make the composition again with different papers and colors...see the changes and by doing it again and again one begins to understand, feel more comfortable and relax with it and begin to explore. 

Secondly we move to using a view finder or a small square cut out frame of water color paper and searched for interesting compositions to carry out with our collage papers..

What's hard to understand is to not copy but to explore, listen to you inner artist guide you as you can see the sample about is a practice or sketch but taking a view from a larger image and repeating it to some degree is what can guide you to take a risk and approach the surfaces.   Here you see the basic line flow repeated in the collage sketch.

We then moved into the Gesture line...seems to be everyone favorite.

This is not one of my better examples but you get the point I hope, of the gesture line as a guide or the foundation of the composition.. 

Next I gave a taste of the Jan 2012 class...Free Flow Mixed Media Collage,

this class is set up to really loosen up the art jeans...it's one of my funniest styles to working...

Here's a sample of repeating the collage sketch, the compositions are the same but the papers are bit different...after doing this a few times one becomes knowledgeable about what they are doing and can take greater risk and be willing to experiment more. 

Well must pack up and head out...more later