Workshop Thursday

In November I declared Thursday would be Workshop day - and I thought it was time to start again in 2012.
I discovered (after everyone else it seems!) Strathmore 2012 Online workshops -- they are FREE! I have joined up to do the first in the series by Traci Bautista whose work I love,

Click on the highlighted text for Traci's website and blog

and whose first book I already own

Click here for a peek inside via Amazon

The classes started at the beginning of January, so I am a little behind, but that just means I can work at my own pace.
Week 1 is Playful Printmaking, and is divided into 2 parts. So these are my efforts for Week 1, Part 1.
First layer = stencilling. Best new idea for me here - cut your own stencils from needlepoint canvas!

Great for texture and also for shapes

- can see they are going to be very useful.
I'm used to laying down my stencils and spraying, so this first part was right in my comfort zone. Used circles from that needlpoint canvas, and also some of my old fav's - paper doilies and letter stencils.

First layer of stencils sprayed over.

Best new learning for me (a duh moment!) was that when you flip the stencil over to get the remaining paint off, roll over the back of it with a brayer.... makes a much better 'reverse' print. 
On the below sheet you can see the reverse of the doilie (top right) brayered lower middle. Also the alpha bottom left, has the reverse brayered top left. A couple of the circles are done like this too.

The nice thing about being in a class (and starting late!) is that you can learn from classmate comments...realised that these shapes needed to stay permanent for the layers (unlike some of the water-soluble inks I am learning to use and blend in Roben-Marie's course) so I used my lovely permanent Golden Airbrush sprays. Here's my finished stencilled layers.

Next was doodling with paint. Because I had used the Golden airbrush colours, I turned to my Golden fluid acrylics next. My first layer of doodles was green which I thought was a bit much (green not being my colour). Happier once that was "toned down" a bit with some purple...purple being very much my colour ;-)

Orange joined the party and this is how I've left the piece for now...

Didn't do a wash in the background yet as Traci suggested - I quite like all that stencil texture. Think I will step away from it overnight and see where the muse takes me tomorrow.
Week 1, Part 2 is doodling on this with markers and pens - looking forward to that.