Lynne Perella, Part 2

First a little background in how I came to do these workshops. One of the collaborative journal groups I belong to was inspired by a project that Lynne participated in; the project produced a beautiful and inspiring book called True Colors.

I read it, fell in love with it, and was eager to join the color journal group, which has now been going on for about 5 months.

When I saw that The Ink Pad was sponsoring two of Lynne's workshops I immediately registered.

Both days covered the same techniques with different themes. On Saturday we used asian images, and Sunday's workshop used medieval images as a starting point.

Lynne's paintings and collages are richly colored and layered. Many times throughout the weekend she talked about how we are what and who we are not because of one experience or set of circumstances, but of many. We are layered, and if you pull one layer away there is still something interesting underneath.

The art we produced is like that. The first layer was all the texture and dimension we added with the gesso.

After our lunch break we began adding color. We squirted acrylics on the dried paper, brushed and brayered it, adding more, scraping away some, using some metallic paint. This layer was another opportunity to add even more dimension. I added some tissue paper and covered it with paint. Others added netting, stencil waste, scraps of paper. We also continued to make marks with various objects.

Some people used masks, stencils, rubber stamps and other objects that acted as stamps.

In addition to the paint we made good use of the Portfolios (water soluble oil pastels), a wonderful product, and one that I will surely use again and again.

Remembering the morning exercise, we could also add bits of paper, tiny scraps, whatever we wanted.

The next layer consisted of images. We'd been asked to bring in toner copies of theme-related images, and colored images from books, wrapping paper, newspapers, scrapbook paper.

Some people adhered their images in a seemingly random fashion.

Others used a kind of grid pattern.

Lynne showed us how to make them our own by coloring, cutting, masking them and altering them in other ways. I enjoyed coloring an asian-inspired scene and then cutting it up into small pieces and adhering them throughout my paper. Kind of like the image exploded and reassembled in a totally new order.

More of this wonderful collage journey next time.