Goat!

Last week, in my continuing effort to squeeze as much art as possible in before school starts, I attended a two-day workshop with Julie Fei-Fan Balzer at Studio CRESCENDOh in Santa Ana.  In it I started two large collage paintings, one of which I finished today. Look how big it is!

Goat! by Florence Turnour

For this canvas, Julie directed us to draw a large half-face, but I decided I'd rather have a half goat face.  She reassured us that almost anything with a mouth and eyes will be recognizable as a face, but it occurred to me about a quarter of the way in that this was not necessarily true for goats.  I used a snapshot from my phone, and worried over the minimal drawing on my canvas for a while before diving in.  (I was finally spurred forward when Julie's mother, Eileen, passed by my table and said, "Oh, a goat." Sometimes even goats need validation.)

I was super excited to learn how to glue.  Collage has always been one of my favorite media, but I was not ever happy with the final glued down version of my plan.  In these projects we used Matte Medium as the adhesive, and painted it on. All the paper in my collage is painted Deli paper that I had made on the Gelli Plate. I love cutting stencils (using my Silhouette electronic cutter, and my computer), and making foam stamps, and have made stacks of I'm-not-sure-what-I'm-going-to-do-with-it painted papers. Now that I know how to glue, I need MORE.

Here are some close-ups from my goat.

And here's the full painting, without my smiling face (and kumquat tree).

Goat! by Florence Turnour

I've long been a fan and follower of Julie's work, and I've taken many of her on-line classes.  Just last week, I did this watercolor from her video in Creative Jumpstart 2016.  I was excited to find Julie's as engaging and friendly and full of information in person as she sounds on her videos. I was also impressed (education junkie that I am) at her strategies to help us learn to improve our artwork over the long run, in addition to learning how to do the project at hand.

I'll be finishing my other canvas next, while the paper scraps are still thick on the floor. It's an abstract, and I've really no idea where I'm going with it. Should be fun!  Thank you again, Julie! I learned tons.  Thanks for looking.