Mixed Media Journals with Jacki Long

I just turned over my calendar! Hooray! It's May!


Today I had some time to take one of artist Jacki Long's classes at Catalyst, in Westminster.

https://www.artsupplywarehouse.com/catalyst.php

Catalyst is a space run by the Art Supply Warehouse, which is a combination of classroom and art gallery.

The Art Supply Warehouse provides the materials (a journal, paint, brushes) and Jacki gives us some ideas to make creative Journals.


Jacki has maintained her blog, every single day for over 2000 days!!!

http://jackilong.blogspot.com/

She inspired me to try to start my own blog.

No matter how exciting my day was, it's hard to set aside time to blog!

I can update every couple days, but not every day.



The class was small, about 6 people.

We all knew Jacki and had taken at least one of her classes before.

We didn't need a lot of introduction.

Everyone got busy painting and pasting.

It was a good three hours of artistic therapy.

I didn't go around taking pictures of everyone else's work, but after I got home from work, I took some pictures of the things I did.

These are mostly just backgrounds, to add things to later.

I don't know why, but whenever I do one of these classes I always grab wild colors.

Jacki provided us with magazines to tear up, and fancy papers, and tissue.



I found a magazine called Birds and Blooms that has a lot of flowers and butterflies.

Here I pasted a garden plan, and put some tissue paper around it.

Jacki always recommends starting with a grid to get rid of "artists block"

Here is a grid (also under construction):

The picture of this grid came out blurry, but it's been a long day and I'm not going to re-shoot it:

I really like the Bob Ross brand black Gesso for a background, it wasn't gritty at all.



Jacki is really great at painting and collaging faces.

She has a lot of techniques to get started with making faces.


Here we started by spreading some dabs of paint that will become faces.

It isn't anything yet, but I can already see a grumpy face looking out at me.

We will be meeting again in 2 weeks.

The class was so inspiring, I'm sure I'll have half the sketchbook filled by then!