Summer Workshop, Part 2

Here are a couple of photos of Michele and Pam hard at work. They are making their own palettes of tissue paper by applying an acrylic wash to white tissue paper. By laying the tissue on a plastic work surface before painting, it will dry and then peel off for future use. We produced other kinds of paper on Day 1 too, some using black or white gesso on tissue which was very useful.
On Day 2, Diane asked us to use some of our coloured tissue to collage a full page, without thinking at all about placement. She gave us a handout showing almost twenty different kinds of successful composition, and we used viewfinders to select portions of our work that worked well as a composition.
One of my 4-inch squares shows the "pyramid" format, another the "compression" format.

I was then left with a 9-inch square that looked like a "hot mess" to me. With a little guidance from Diane, I added a touch of red here, a touch of white there, to help lead the eye around the whole surface a little better. Maybe it now qualifies as an "Echoing Shapes" or "Shape within a Shape" format.

Another exercise involved applying white gesso to a surface of natural canvas, then collaging tissue onto the dried gesso. Maybe another "Echoing Shapes"?
On Day 3, we were supposed to make a collage using papers we had made on Day 1, using small, medium and large shapes, all different. I worked from one of my photos. Good points: each corner is different, and the size of the shapes all along the edges are mostly different. However, somehow the focal point (the cat) shifted into the middle, and I have strong black lines bisecting the piece horizontally and vertically. I have concluded, sadly, that there is no saving this composition!

A very stimulating and challenging three days with, I hope, applications to future work.