traci bautista classes this past weekend

This past weekend, I took two Traci Bautista classes at The Artists’ Nook. Christine put some photos of the weekend on her blog, so go take a look!

I’m very glad I took the classes. Traci has always struck me as a sweet and funky artist and I’ve been enjoying her book, Collage Unleashed, so I was looking forward to the weekend. I wasn’t disappointed. I spent my time playing, thinking about my collage in a different way and generally having a silly time with all of the great artists who were also taking the classes.

On Saturday, I took The Graffiti Bouquet and learned about different ways to layer, dye, stain, stamp, collage, write and draw. I worked on three collages, but none are completed yet. Here’s what I have so far:

On Sunday, I took the Wanderlust Book class, which totally saved me from hating bookbinding. See, ever since I was young, I’ve always been folding pages and making little books, but somewhere along the way, I learned I wasn’t doing it “the right way.” I learned to bind small books a couple of times in the past year, and it was cool and I liked it, but It wasn’t something I wanted to keep doing because it involved measuring. I hate measuring. I also couldn’t remember the pattern of the stitches, even though it was super easy.

Traci’s book was stitched with a running stitch, which I can totally do, and we TORE the pages instead of measuring them. I love the worn look of the book and how it’s all over the place and you never know what you’re going to see next on the pages inside. The pages are some of my painted pages from Saturday and Sunday, old ledger pages, plain paper, old book pages, etc. Totally cool, dude! So, thank you, Traci! You saved bookmaking for me!

I’m looking forward to decorating the pages and adding more fibers and doodads to the binding. This could be a very cool project for some birthday gifts in the coming year.

You can click the images to see larger versions.