Artist Play Date in SoCal with Jamie Fingal

Greetings!  Last weekend I flew to Orange County CA to attend a family wedding.  I extended my stay in order to get some work done with my friend and partner in crime, Jamie Fingal.  We do a great deal together:  teach, curate, and more, but we rarely afford ourselves the opportunity to simply play.  In fact, I'm not sure we have ever taken an afternoon and created something that was not intended for a workshop or some other project.  So, it felt really luxurious and fun to take the afternoon before I headed to the airport and simply make art.
The Sketchbook Challenge theme this month is "Collage" which is right up my alley.  I do a great deal of collage work in both paper and cloth (and, as in this case, the combination of both).  If you are stopping by after visiting the SBC blog you know I have a post up over there with one of my collaged pages.  Here is the second of three that were partially created while at Jamie's studio.

Here is the ephemera from my trip that will be used for the base layers of my collages.

In addition, I used some newsprint from the day's local paper and some scrap paper from Jamie's studio.

I scratched over the surface with some opaque white paint to "mess" it up a bit.

Using the Fingal Flower & Leaf stencil I pushed some bronze & black paint onto the surface.

In addition I used an old letter stencil from an office supply store to add some texture 

to the collage surface.

Here are the three collages I was working with.

Here is an aerial view of our work table with Jamie working at it.

After the surface dried I worked back into it with a Pentel Gel Roller pen.

I moved across the surface and selected some shapes that I wanted to accentuate.

I wrote a few thoughts over the collage surface...

When I returned home I decided to die-cut some fused silk organza that I had stashed in my 

fabric shelf.  Prior to cutting the dress shape I pre-fused the organza with Mistyfuse.

I accentuated the fused shape within the dress with the Pentel Fabric pen.

After fusing to the collage surface I outlined the dress shape so it became more visible in the collage.

I cut the collage into an 8x8 inch square in order for it to fit into my sketchbook.

This page will face the page I created for my SBC post.  It provides a lovely memory of the wedding weekend in California.  Thanks for stopping by!