La Maison Fantome

Assemblage class with Michael DeMeng in NOLA. A week of good food, architecture, tours, cemeteries, voodoo ceremonies, and ART. 

 Fried shrimp & hush puppies at Cajun Cabin on arrival. We'd been up since 4:30am California time and it was about 3:30 New Orleans time. We only had a small snack on the plane and we were starving! This hit the spot!!

 A band marched by as we were eating lunch.

 Outside our hotel, The Inn on Bourbon.

 In the hotel lounge.

 Night scene on Bourbon.

 The Voodoo Temple where we had our welcoming meet & greet and a blessing ceremony for our creativeness. Following are shots from inside the museum.

This patio had a somewhat creepy vibe. Found out later that an extremely gruesome murder took place in the apartment above the museum.  This is priestess Miriam.

More pics later....

AmyFaerie's A R T Pennant Swap

Here are some pennants I made recently for a swap at ATCSFORALL.COM.  These were so much fun to create and the returns in the swap were fabulous!!The one with the baby is for me, the frozen charlotte dolly was a host gift for Amy, and the others were for the swap. Can't believe I made something in such bright colors. 

 

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Cold Blooded Journals with Michael DeMeng

July 9, 2011, my friend, Evelyn, and I travelled to Solvang to attend this workshop. We had so much fun on the roadtrip, as well as touring Solvang, shopping, and eating! All I can say is: If you ever get the chance to take one of MDM's classes DO IT!!! Michael is the most unpretentious guy and one helluva instructor!! He thoroughly (and patiently) walked us through all the steps needed to create our little monsters including a safety and info demo on the power drill vs the Dremel. Chroma crackle usually takes a few days to achieve the "crackle" affect, but Michael showed us his technique for obtaining instant crackle with the product. It was amazing!!

My journal cover started out looking like a lava-fest - it was RED! I just wasn't happy with it, so upon returning to our room for the evening I worked and worked on it and came up with the final version above. I'm now very happy with the results. I learned so much about how to put this thing together and will incorporate all my boo-boos into my next effort. Since I'd never done anything quite like this, I learned one needs to think ahead about how all the pieces will be attached and some logical order into doing so.

Michael had several of his assemblage pieces and sketches for sale so of course I had to buy a little pencil sketch. Lucky me - I also "donated" a baby doll head for a demo, so I came away with it painted by MDM!!! NO! I didn't ask him to sign it, even though someone suggested I do so, I felt like it would be kinda "stalker-ish".

At the end of the day we all took our journals upstairs to the wine bar next door for a show-and-tell. Complimentary wine and goodies awaited us and after everyone was comfy Michael did a review on ALL of our journals. He asked if we wanted to say anything about our work and then he pointed out several things that worked in our piece. He had wonderful things to say about each and every journal (I think there were about 21 or so of us in the class!) It was very nice to have feedback and to be able to hear everyone talk about what they did or why.

It was a great weekend and we're looking forward to attending MDM's La Maison Fantome class in New Orleans at the end of Jan/first of Feb. I've never been to NOLA, so it's going to be very exciting. We have 3 days of class with a couple of days in between of tours. I hear a seance is in the works at one of the haunted hotels. Can't wait!!

Digital Art

Some recent fun with Photoshop Elements 8 - don't laugh, I'm still in the learning process.

KatiLady's Challenge

My friend, Kati, has a great post showing how her ATCs have progressed. I promised I'd post my first ATC. It is soooooooo funny - thought I'd post a little progression of my own. 2009 saw a distinct move away from ATCs into 4 x 4 chunky book pages. I'm amazed at how my art has changed - it doesn't seem as "flat" to me as it once way. I like it better - it's fun learning new ways to keep art evolving!!

Macabre???

Found poetry ATC's for an online swap. I love using these images from an old, old, old surgery textbook. Some of the girls loved them, some not so much! lol

Cemetery Angel Altered Photo ATCs

This is a set of ATC's I did recently for a Cemetery Angel Altered Photo online swap.
The pics had to be our own. Wish I had more time to scout out some interesting cemeteries to take more pictures. Hard to find the Angels....