My days spent with Dina

Last week I spent three days at Ink About It in Westford, MA taking four classes with Dina Wakley, a truly awesome teacher! (Thanks for taking the picture Erika! )  She brings to her classes all of her experience with so many mixed media techniques, knowledge from studying great artists of the past as well as contemporary ones, and fantastic tips to help you think about color and composition and the flow of your pieces.

These are all the projects we did in the classes - I loved them all!

This one is her 'homage to Dyan Reaveley' class - so funny that I took Dyan's 'homage to Dina Wakely' version earlier this summer! - using Dylusions inks and stamps to make a folded one page book to hold a set of tags.

This accordion book is comprised of collaged tags starting with paint and ink randomly on the tag and completed using book papers, computer generated quotes, and stamped tissue paper all layered together with beeswax. I've not done much with beeswax and really enjoyed  putting this one together.

Here are a couple close-ups of some of my favorites:

Next I have my results from her drawing faces class.  I have to confess that I've never drawn faces before - never actually tried because I didn't think I could.  I was amazed by the results with Dina's tips and a Stabilo Marks All pencil! I still need a lot of practice here - especially with lips ugh!! - but I do feel more confident to try.

This close up is of the background from the one on the right.  I love the visual texture you get from scraped acrylic paint and lifting it with stenciling!  This is becoming a new favorite :-)

The final class was an all day play with art journaling and we made SIX pages and combined them into a book. I learned SO MUCH in this class from creating a starting background to composing a page taking into consideration your focal point and how you want your viewer's eye to be directed around the page.  One incredibly helpful part of the whole class was offering up a page for the class to critique - I've never been in a class that did that before.  There were so many talented people in the class and they gave such great opinions about what they would do next and options and ideas to consider.  Not only did you learn something from your own page, but in seeing other's pages and discussing what was working and what needed work you start to develop a critical eye that will be invaluable as you make more and more pages, not to mention the inspiration of seeing what everyone else was doing with the same basic supplies.  Before folding the pages into books, we all laid out our pages all around the floor of the store. Wow.  It was great to be a part of that class.

Here are my pages:

 

This one uses a classic Dina silhouette mask technique and writing inside of it.

More shape silhouettes and the start of my attempts to leave more white space rather than flooding a page with color.

More Dina silhouettes, but as stamped tissue paper collaged onto the page. I worked on this page after doing the background in class, and I kind of created two focal points as I played.  I wasn't sure what to do so I tried linking them together with messy writing that is more of a design element, a feature of Dina's work that I really like.

This page has a gel medium resist foundation. I'm not sure what I'll do next with this one.......

I love this page - there's more of the fantastic scraped paint and lifted stenciling background with a pop of complementary colors added with the collaged elements.

On the final page I had Dina add her autograph, and I've played with it more since the class - it was a messy spray ink stenciled background that I wasn't happy with, so I gessoed over it - all but the autograph, of course! - and then did some guess what...scraped paint and lifted stenciling! I added Stabilo pencil circles and swirls and added Portfolio oil pastels for color and some visual texture with a text stamp and turned them into flowers. Maybe it needs some book paper leaves.....

I have had what feels like a perfect trifecta of mixed media experiences with classes this summer starting with Dyan Reaveley in July, Julie Fei-Fan Balzer in August, and now Dina, too. I really feel like each one has built upon the other and I have learned a tremendous amount from these fabulous teachers to keep my creative juices flowing for quite some time!