a weekend with claudine hellmuth

Thursday afternoon my two friends (Aly & Catherine) and I headed up to Art in the Loft in Alpena, MI to take a lovely little workshop from the talented Claudine Hellmuth.

This is an example of one of her whimsical collage works.

The first day we learned how to create any color we want by mixing the appropriate amounts of primary colors and black & white paint.

Then each gal at our table chose a color combination of their liking and we created cool collage tags.

Isn’t that a fun apron?  One of the gals at our table makes them!

I made the kitty divine cover and the 4 other tags were made by my table mates.

It was fun to see all the other color stories.

Day 2 we learned how to make textured backgrounds and create balanced compositions.

One of the background techniques was gluing down paper, then peeling back a layer and then glazing with paint.

Here’s one of Aly’s compositions in the works. That’s her adorable little boy, Jack.

… and Catherine’s four legged friends.

And here is my first collage creation. That’s our lovely Berkley manager, Danielle and our store cat, Piper.  The stamping around the edge reads, "The gift wrappin’ gals love to practice perching on pretty presents."

Tomorrow… more delightful creations!