ArtFest Fun and a Deck of Roses

Thank you to all of my blog readers who said hello at ArtFest. It means a lot to know that you actually read my blog. It's fun to be apart of an artist community to share artwork and support one another. This year, I stayed in one of the Officer's Houses at Fort Worden with some of my Portland Art Collective friends- Tory, Dayna, Steph, Suzanne and Debi. Maggie joined us from Olympia. With all of the laughter and creative stimulation, I sure didn't get much sleep.

Orly Avineri taught my first class called The Deck of Roses. She gave us each a rose for inspiration and rose water to paint our abstract rose that covered the whole 18x24 inch piece of watercolor paper. The fragrance lingered in the room and on the cards. I highly recommend Orly's workshops. She's a good teacher, well organized, starts with layers of abstraction and free form exercises. Then, each artist adds her own style in other layers.

Here is my abstract, rose water rose. We turned this over and worked on the other side using several different techniques. Afterwards we tore the paper into cards. On the rose side, I collaged copies of my sketches.

On the other layered side, I experimented with different ideas -added a wash to the card below to highlight the drawn roses.
-made roses out of decorative paper
-added another one of my rose sketches
-used a white gel pen to highlight the center rose and dried rose petals fragments.
-drew more roses inspired by the shape of my orange beauty.
The color of my class rose gave me the enthusiasm, excitement and desire to create this deck of roses. My next post will show the diptych created in Orly's second class called Roots & Shoots.