Second Skin and a Bracelet

Challenges are always fun especially when you get play with completely new items. For this challenge my friend and fellow Canadian Carmi sent Michael and I a terrific goody bag with: a brass cuff, leather cutting scissors and this cool fish leather called Second Skin.



Working with the Second Skin really was just like working with any other leather....I grabbed the teal coloured one and began experimenting. With a little piece I had left over the first thing I decided to try was heating up the Second Skin...you know what happened?...The fish scale texture became exaggerated and raised and predictably the colour darkened a bit. I love the raised texture so I decided to do the same thing to the leather I had already glued onto the cuff. Next I added a little collage/assemblage winged heart that I had been working on but it still needed something more....something dangly. I pierced a small hole through the leather and the cuff where I attached some beads and figured and that point it was about as bedazzled as I wanted it, but not quite done....I added some paint glazes to a few sections of the second skin and voila...here's what I ended up with...


...now I'm going to need some more since my daughter (the hand model) decided that this bracelet was going to be hers....! Check out John Bead's blog for more info on how to order.

2013...

Well friends I hope that you had a wonderful holiday season and the beginning of 2013 is treating you well. I can already tell this is going to be a busy, busy year! Lot's of projects in the works, not the least of which is the upcoming book for Art Abandonment and pretty full teaching schedule.

Here's a bit of what I have planned so far...more specifics to be added once I details firmed up.

March 9-10  at the Upstart Crow in Delta, BC


Mixed Media Mythologies


Mixed Media Mythologies
Collaging the Translucent

April 4-7 Art-is-You, Nashville, TN

Illuminated Manuscripts


Beauty in the Beast a duo class I'll be teaching with my wonderful hubby Michael deMeng
Illuminated Manuscripts

April 23-27 Artology Retreat, Port Townsend, WA

Michael and I team up again for four fabulous workshop days of the Fantastical Fantocini - collaged puppet theatre sets and found object puppets

 May 9-10 Random Arts, Saluda, NC
Collaging the Translucent

Collaging the Translucent
Metamorphosis


May 16-18   Small Studios, Avonlake, OH
Illuminated Manuscripts

Illuminated Manuscripts (2-day class)
Marquis de Scroll

June 16-23   Salty Sea-Dogs & Sumptuous Sirens, New York, NY
Seadusa - Sideshow Banner

Hang out in amazing New York City with Michael and I. Four days of workshop will have us working on collaged and painted Sideshow Banners and aquatic inspired found object Masks that we'll use to participate in the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island! ...don't worry we've added plenty of cool site seeing  on the schedule as well!

July 18th & 20th  Collage, Portland, OR
Collaging the Translucent

Collaging the Translucent
Veils of Psyche

August 3-5   Art Unraveled, Scottsdale, AR
Exquisite Enigmas

Exquisite Enigmas
Marquis de Scroll


September 19-23   Art-is-You, Petaluma, CA
Marquis de Scroll

Illuminated Manuscripts (2 day)
Marquis de Scroll
Exquisit Enigmas
Mixed-Media Mythologies


October 10-14   Art-is-You, Stamford, CT

Mixed Media Mythologies

Marquis de Scroll
Exquisit Enigmas
Mixed-Media Mythologies

November 16-17   Upstart Crow, Delta, BC
Single Minded Binding

Single-Minded Binding (2 day)

...still a couple of more to come. Hope to see you somewhere....!



Once in a Blue Moon....

When's the last time you asked someone how they are and they said "I'm good, really chill, not too much on my plate these days...." I think maybe that happens when you're a young kid, I vaguely remember that feeling of having lots of time and not enough to fill it. I'm not even sure that kids have that luxury these days. 

In any event, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, things have been, well, quite frankly - busy! Busy for me and I'm sure for you too...here's what I've been up to over the summer....after an absolutely wonderful time at Ginny's Small Studio in June, it was time to get ready for Valley Ridge Arts Studio hosted by my dear friend Katherine Engen. 
I've never been to Wisconsin -- but I am fan of cheese so figured that had to be good. Michael had been raving about Valley Ridge forever so I was really looking forward to seeing what the whole place was like. I can tell you that all of the wonderful things I heard about the place are true and then some. The very well-equipped studio is nestled into an expansive property and plays host to a wide variety of delightful wildlife and a few wayward cows from a neighbouring farm looking for greener pastures. Calm, scenic, peaceful -- it's truly amazing. Katherine, is of course a genuinely phenomenal hostess, and even drove me out to the middle of property in the middle of the night to look for shooting stars -- and yes, I saw one...whizzing by too quickly to make a wish though.

Now as far as the classes went, first up was a class I call "Single Minded Binding", essentially a coptic binding technique but allowing for both signatures a single pages. A very cool binding method that I originally became acquainted with some years ago in Keith Smith's books. When it comes to book binding I like to push the envelope a bit and try to bind things that I don't think were actually meant to be bound (like Altoid tins for example). 






This is just a small snippet of some of the great work that was done in class....




The second class I taught was "Transparental Guidance" where we essentially layer and layer and layer different types of collage material, translucent and opaque to build up these artworks....take a look at these...so hard to photograph these well, they are just amazing in person!






























































































Now after I was done teaching, it was my hubby's turn. We hadn't seen in other in a about a month with all the travel and such so I decided to stick around Valley Ridge and took a couple of tables in the back of the room to work on this....


"Intuition" by Andrea Matus de Meng
After leaving Wisconsin, it was time to go home for all of two days! Picked up my girls and then we all headed to Missoula for some time with family, oh yeah, and to sell Michael's house. Snuck in as much R&R as we could between moving boxes and all that jazz. Home for a couple more days and then it was time to head to Arizona for Art Unraveled...and boy was it hot!

Art Unraveled is a great event put on by Linda Young and is held every summer at the Embassy Suites in Scottsdale, Arizona. Linda pulls the event together with a stellar list of first rate artists and instructors and wonderful group of students. I really loved teaching there, the energy at large events like this is always inspiring and it's a great way to make new art friends. While I was there teaching and meeting up with old friends and new, a crazy thing happened -- the little Art Abandonment group started by Michael made it past 5000 members. When we started out, I told Michael that I would make something "big" to abandon if we ever got to 5000. Well, time to deliver, the only problem was I was in Arizona teaching. Luckily I had a non-teaching day between a couple of my classes so I covered our hotel room with drop clothes, prepped a four foot canvas and 17 hours later....I had this:

"The Light Within" by Andrea Matus de Meng


I abandoned her in the elevator at the Embassy Suites and heard back from an employee saying that she found it! Yay!

So that pretty much has us up-to-date. Now we are all getting ready for the start of school on Tuesday, looking for a new house and I'm working away madly in the studio preparing art and class kits for Art-is-You Retreats coming up in Petaluma and Stamford. Hope to see some of you there and promise you'll hear from me again before the next Blue Moon!!