After a pretty intense “school year” (a big job in AAUW, my photo class and club, preparing for my photo show, and the genealogy drama), I have been pretty exhausted and burned out creatively. So I decided to sign up for a little online class this summer that would be a radical departure from what I’ve been doing. It’s called “It’s Elementary,” and the teacher is Tricia Dewey, a very talented digital and mixed media artist.

The subject of the class is creating your own backgrounds and textures to use in photography and digital art- sounds right up my alley, right? You use paint, a gelli plate, a brayer, and stencils and mark making tools to make prints on paper which you combine in Photoshop or in your iPad- endless possibilities. But unfortunately, I brought my stressed out, left brain attitude to the class and found it pretty overwhelming at first. I watched the videos several times, bought the materials- and that was it.

I finally forced myself to start by announcing at my photo club Tuesday that I was hosting a group next week at my house to create textures and backgrounds- and I now have 4 very talented and skilled photographers coming to learn how to do these techniques.  I knew I love to teach and coach others- so now I am committed (or should be committed?).

I have had a very busy week, but did manage to play a little in the paint, which brought me back to my happy first grade teacher self. Oh, how I wish I had all the stamping and printing materials I used to have in my classroom!  It is fun!

I am finding it a challenge to incorporate the new textures and backgrounds into my images, because I normally tend to use textures in a more subtle way- but the idea is to step out of my comfort zone. I’m hoping that my creative friends who come over next week will inspire me to do things in new ways. I will report back!

Some of the textures I’ve created:

The middle one was created on the iPad- no paint involved. The other two started with paint- and then were modified on the iPad.