Dina Wakley is in the HOUSE this week! ~ Self Portraits

Well, Dina Wakley was in the house this week, not my house personally, though she is always welcome here, but she was at Ink About It in Westford, MA for a series of classes.  I was able to do two of her classes.  The first was her all day class called "In Your Image".  This class was all about exploring and playing with art journaling techniques.  One of the goals of the class was to help us learn techniques that include OUR personal image and journaling about our journey through life and other personal history things that we might be hesitant to write about.  You know that you've been out of the "picture" in a lot of family gatherings, etc. when you try to find 8 photos of yourself to use in the class and you are hard pressed to find even that many pictures.  Dina made a good point when she said "years from now your descendants/family members will never ask why there are so many photos of Grandma/you."  All of us wish we had more photos of loved ones or relatives we never met.  So seize the moment, get yourself in the photos as often as possible.  That being said, I forgot my camera that day (oh, the irony of it all) but I do have photos of my work from the class.  We used our own image as the base of each of these journaling pages.  I must admit the only one that really looks like me is the one where I glued my photo on to.  I will put a caption under each mentioning the method used to make the journal page.

We painted over our photo with acrylics, cut it out and glued it to our background.  I call this one "MAD MEN" because I ended up looking like a lady from the 1960's.

For this page we traced our image onto a piece of paper, in my case book paper, using carbon paper.  Then we tore it out, applied color with oil pastels and glued it onto a prepared background.

This technique required us to make a stencil using our own photograph.  First we prepared the background using acrylic paints on a large sheet of watercolor paper.  We trimmed out the photo "stencil" with an Exacto knife and pounced color on to make the face on the background with our stencil and some black permanent ink.  You can use your stencil over and over again.  I used mine here to make "Three Faces of Renee".

"This Girl is On Fire"

I just happened to have this photo of myself that I took in one of those photo booths at the Mall one day.  I had had my makeup done at a make up counter and swore they made me look like a vampire.  Just to prove to myself that it looked as bad as I thought it did I went into the photo booth and posed for a few pics.  I was right, the make up did look very Goth!  If you have to use the photo booth to get pics of yourself just do it, you never know when you can use a bad photo to make art.  Remember that no one has to see any of these pictures or works of art unless you allow them to!  I am not a frilly girl by nature but I've always secretly wanted to be.  That's why I put myself in this frilly ball gown made out of strips of paper that we made in the class.  This one is my favorite of all four.

If you ever get a chance to take a class with Dina I would tell you to GO FOR IT!  She is very relaxed and fun to be with.  Dina is a great teacher and I for one always learn something new and exciting from her classes.  Later this week I'll share some of the photos from her second class which was about Gelli Plate art.  Thanks for stopping by ~Renee

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