I got backgrounds

I'm very tardy in posting about ZNE Convenzione, the art retreat in Pleasanton that happened on August 22-24. (First of all, I must admit to being very lame. I had a camera with me the entire weekend and never took any pictures!! Mainly, I forgot, or when I did remember, my hands were covered in paint!)

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, you should check out American Harvest on Main Street in downtown Pleasanton. This was an amazing find during the Bella Galleria walk on Friday, August 22. They have a wonderful selection of vintage finds, jewelry, art, etc. I want to drop by again when they're not bursting at the seams with Convenzione attendees (we all had $10 gift certicates burning a hole in our wallets)! I could easily spend hours exploring that shop.

On Friday, I also got my copy of the ZNE Zaftig chunky book, pictured below.

So very chunky! Yes, someone pasted a plastic doll to their page!

And here's my page:

Saturday was an all-day workshop. I enrolled in Chrysti Hydeck's class, Baby Got Back(grounds). It was an intense, technique-oriented class on painting fabulous distressed looking backgrounds and it was the best part of the whole weekend. If you ever have the chance to take a class with Chrysti, I highly recommend it. She's a fun, enthusiastic teacher with TONS of ideas and the techniques she taught us were just amazing. I was pretty quiet that day, focused on absorbing as much as possible and trying to slap down as much paint as possible, too! Many times I wanted to snap some photos, but my hands always had paint on them! (Now I know to bring a disposable camera next time, that I won't mind getting dirty.) Michele Beschen was also in this class, but I didn't get a chance to really talk to her until the following day at the vendor fair. She's so nice and I just got an email from her that I won one of her DVDs in a drawing! Yay!

By the end of the day, I had the beginnings of an art journal (all the pages have paint - woo hoo!):

Chrysti taught us how to do gel medium transfers in less than two minutes! And look how well they turn out:

I also started about five canvases. This is the first one, it's all about texture:

Here's a detail of the fleur de lis from the second canvas. The camera flash washed out the colors quite a bit. The background is crimson and the fleur de lis is copper. But you can see the distressing and crackling in the fleur de lis quite well:

And on Sunday, there was shopping at the vendor fair! Thank goodness! I needed some shopping therapy to regain my strength. Once again, I had my camera with me, yet forgot to take pictures! What a sight it was - every spare inch of the Veteran's Building was filled with tables of artsy goodness! I spent too much money (which I knew I would do). I'll have to lay it all out and snap some photos; it'll be like a mini vendor fair. That'll be my next post.