Let Your Heart Speak

What is Studioworks Creative Academy?

Hello fellow artist creatives!

I am an artist working primarily in the art of collage. It is my first love. My passion. My absolute purpose in life is connected to this art medium.

I thoroughly believe that collage is the perfect medium for representing the fractured and fragmented bits of our lives, brought together to form a beautiful and complete picture in a way that allows us to share our stories, either overtly or with subtle design.

My process is intuitive. I come to the table with an open mind and an open heart. Sure, there are some things that need to be determined in advance of the project – what size do I want it to be? What materials will I use? Do I want to mix up my mediums or strictly create with paper and glue? But aside from the technical decision making required to get me started, I’ve learned that my best work comes when I get out of my own way and allow the work to tell me what it wants to be.

It sounds a little obscure and mysterious, but what it all boils down to is giving yourself permission to follow your own creative curiosity to discover that everything you really need to know about creating a great composition is already inside of you.

While I’ve divided this workshop into three distinct technique focused units, with each one offering skills that will enable you to create beautiful works of art from that one technique alone, the flow of this course brings these three processes together to a satisfying and rewarding conclusion.

Lesson 1: monoprint magic

In this lesson, we explore the magic of monoprinting by transferring magazine images to a gel plate. I purchased my gel plate after seeing students bring their own beautiful handmade papers to my workshops. But I tend to use found and salvaged ephemera and didn’t wind up doing much with my gel plate, relegating it to the back of the supply closet, until the day that I stumbled across this technique.

Now, you could say I’m a bit of an addict when it comes to selecting magazines and images to transfer to my plate. It took some practice, but I finally cracked the code of what makes a successful monoprint and I am excited to share it with you.

Lesson two: the art of collage

Lesson two brings us to the art of collage. My first love. My friend. My co-conspirator in the studio always. Almost everything I create has an undercurrent of collage. If not as the main event, paper is usually incorporated into my work somehow.

I’ll talk about the intuitive process as we dive into this art form, from gathering materials, to deciding which monoprint to use for this project, to working through a composition that pleases the eye and makes your own soul dance.

I’ll tell you about my favorite adhesive and why I like to blend it from two different products on the market, start you off with a five minute exercise to get your creative wheels turning, help you identify what your own intuitive response sounds like, and how to identify when it is actually your inner art critic giving you grief while you work.

Lesson Three: encaustic TO COMPLETION

Lesson three is the icing on the cake. If icing were made of beeswax and resin. Where layers of paper can represent the internalized and individual parts of ourselves, encaustic could be the proverbial skin. The beautiful, luminous, rich, molten medium will serve to protect and enhance our work and offer a stunning finish to which we can add objects and manipulate the surface to further develop the design of our composition.

Of course, I’ll give you the ins and outs of safety and setup if you’re new to this medium, and when the course is done, you’ll have the confidence to continue to delve even deeper into all the possibilities the use of encaustic wax can open in the artistic process. But here, we’ll use it with the collage in mind. How does the surface of the work take it from good to outstanding? Is it going to be subtle or dominate the work? You are the artist. You get to decide – and I’ll help you by showing you several examples.

 Who is this class for?

If you are completely new to any of these mediums, this class will walk you through to a successful conclusion. If you are already skilled in the use of printing, collage, and encaustic, this class will challenge you to think outside the box to combine them.

Touching on tapping into the innate knowing we carry within, along with the vast resource of internalized information about what makes a good design, I seek to enable the artist at any level of experience to go further in their practice, learning to trust their own abilities to develop and own their own style of expression. I hope you’ll join me on this journey.

• Baby wipes

• Paper towels

• Wax Paper

• Scissors

• Ruler

• Utility knife with sharp blade

• Cutting mat