Mixed media fun

So, I went to the workshop I talked about last night. Initially, I was nervous since clearly I had misunderstood the instruction about collage (I was supposed to bring collage materials, not a collage). However, it turned out all right. Teesha had plenty of collage materials for us to work with and I was forced to be a bit more creative in terms of creating a journal around fish.

We first prepped our books by painting watercolor paper with acrylic paints. Next, we bound them into a small journal. After that it was collaging time - first the borders of some of the pages (there wasn't enough time to do the entire book). Next, we worked on our content for the pages - the collages of our various beasts. Then came time for pen work, which meant we added color and marks to the collage primarily with pens. Finally, we got to the cover and how to do the collage and paint it.

Mine's nowhere near finished but I finished one two-page spread. I think it turned out pretty nice:

I guess I was still thinking about Moby Dick and that eye of his, though my whale isn't white. All in all, it was a lot of fun and really freeing to just start making marks without worrying too much about how it turned out. That's one of the joys of the "beginner's mind" - fearlessness and pleasure at just having created something you didn't know you could.