Less is More- Keeping it Simple...

 

Our month-of-February lesson for Fodder School 3 was taught by artist/instructor Jennifer Wilkin Penick. I'm sharing the work I did in her classes here. But first off, I'll offer a bit of info about Fodder School 3. It's a year-long series of classes in mixed media art. There is a new teacher and project each month. During one half of the month, students get instruction in the artist's special and favorite techniques for creating papers and elements referred to as "fodder." 

Then, in the other half of the month, the elements come together in a creative project. The variety of projects and methods keeps Fodder School always interesting. 

Jennifer's lessons focused first on painting and embellishing an assortment of papers we would use in our projects. The lessons certainly helped me to look at paper designs in a different way. We even used magazine paper and old book pages.

Modifying the papers once they were painted was a fun endeavor, and it only added to the many choices we'd have once it came to making our projects. I'm always a fan of recycling the liners from security envelopes, and popping a few of them into the mix became a really nice accent. 

A close look will reveal that the vase in this still-life began as a sheet of music paper. 

Jennifer titled her project Simple Shapes Sampler. Starting with a simple shape and then building a collage arrangement from them was very relaxing and creative. These little shapes remind me of tongue depressors. Pretty simple! 

Floral designs were fun.

And just picture the blizzard of paper scraps generated when we began to cut these pie shapes. Putting them together in colorful wheels was more fun than cleaning up the workspace afterwards.

One flower leads to another. The variations on a theme could go on and on.

And here's the entire project- a concertina book. It's a challenge to photograph one of these as they stretch out across the desk. But you get the idea. 

A feature of a concertina book is that it can showcase a lot of these collages in a small space, and then it folds up nicely. This was such an enjoyable project. Would you be surprised if I told you that I have plenty of little shapes left over with which to make even more delightful collages? It's true!