But Can the Teacher Learn?

Before I began the MATS course I was fooling around with a wet, watercolor line infused with other colors from a loaded brush. I love this fish but have never tried a whole composition this way.

The white space is the appeal.

You can see how I used this line in these little houses…

And this butterfly and rabbit

So, when the assignment was to design a plate, I went for a folk art look, with a chocolate colored ground to make it seem appetizing! The design is old fashioned, though it involved a great deal of newly learned Photoshop  coloring and layering!

If I didn’t have the great good fortune of having Elizabeth Dulemba as a teaching colleague at Hollins, I’d never have been able to manage this level of digital prowess.

I continued to try and improve how I presented the whole package. Here is my final design.

Teaching…and trying to learn

I have seven, very talented writers in my class at Hollins this summer.

I am trying to teach them everything I know about conceiving, writing, revising, and revising, and tightening, and twisting, and revising yet again.

THEY are getting better every day.

As I have been teaching, I’ve also been taking an online course from Lilla Rogers: Making Art That Sells.

And, Oh, what a humbling and difficult road this has been. I realized immediately that my photoshop skills were dismal and needed a huge boost. My habit of trying out a new style for every new book really made decisions on which way to go on each assignment difficult.

And I realized I am not good at following directions at all!

Can the teacher learn?

I sure hope so.

The 1st assignment was to design bolt fabric using mushrooms and casserole dishes. Naturally, I did not follow directions very well and found the instructions for making a design that could repeat using Illustrator WAY too hard to learn.

So I painted mushrooms-which I have always been fascinated by…

and casseroles, which are less appealing…

and somehow  chickens demanded in.

This part reminded me of the good old days making fabric icons for Joe Boxer. I worked for them back when Nick and Denise still ran the place in San Francisco. My nickname was “The Queen of Cute.”

When I finally succeeded in putting together a jpeg file of the correct size and scale I was wrung out!

But I  had LEARNED! I was getting the idea of layers and I think there is some humor.

Let’s see what next week brings…

I