Ann Baldwin Art & Soul class

Day 3 of Art & Soul was a change from metal and beads and organisation. I took Ann Baldwin's 'Collaging with words & paint - Text & Texture' class. I haven't painted a picture for about 30 years.....

Ann is a British artist who lives in California, and who works with a range of media. If you want to know more, have a look at her website: http://www.annbaldwin.com/

Ann made us dive in at the deep (and fast) end by getting the whole class to create a collage on red paper, using pieces cut from magazines, which had to be text based but where you couldn't use whole words!!! We had 30 minutes... There were about 25 of us in class, and the whole class was pretty quiet - you could feel the concentration - while we all snipped and stuck, snipped & stuck!!! Ann randomly selected a few collages to explain about composition and what made them work. Each and every collage was quite different, and some were pretty amazing.

Ann demonstrated her own 'collaging with paint' technique, talking about the paints she likes, the way she works in her studio, and showing us how she creates texture and builds up a painting. Ann's paintings have somewhere in the region of 45 layers of paint on them. Each layer adds depth, and the colours look quite different when layered to the way they would look if you mixed them on the pallette then applied them. I enjoyed the class, and liked using the fluid acrylic paints. When I last painted, I used gouache paints, and this was quite a different experience.

I was quite pleased with the piece I produced, even if I only had time to add about 15 layers of paint. It is A4 size:


A few days after the class, I needed to create a double page spread in an altered board book round robin, so I thought I would use the techniques I had learnt (and the same colours, as those are all the paints I have!!!!) and this is the result: