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Patterns, More Mail Art, & Teaching a Very Small Class

It’s odd.  Today is the 1 day a week that I teach all day long.  I teach a group of older woman from 9 am to noon and a group of teenagers from 1 pm to 4 pm.  They are good classes and a good mix of folks.  However, today, only the boys showed up to the teen painting class.  They are copying Rembrandt and Francis Bacon portraits respectively.  The one fellow is an exceptional drafter while the other is very heavy handed and “fantastic” in his creations.  I picked their portrait artists to try to play up their strong points.  Hopefully it works.  The reason it feels odd to only have two guys in class though, is that I have a ton of down time.  I can’t look over their shoulder the whole afternoon.  There would be no point.  They would get nothing done and probably learn very little.  How much time spent with two people is too much time?  I’m not sure, and so I started working on another drawing to send out in my mail art series.

I started with a background pattern which I made this morning while doing the demo featuring slow dry mediums for acrylics.  The borders in the pattern ended up really smooth and transitioned very nicely I thought.  Over the top it seemed appropriate to use a drop drawing and pipe work as the flow of the paint and the flow of the subject matter seemed similar.  Here are the results and the image of the sewn envelope.

I was very pleased with this drawing.  I think that the pattern behind the image really seemed to add something to the overall take away of the piece.  I think I will start doing some more very simple patterns. This is the first piece that I’ve done with red thread.  I’m not sure that I like it as well as the black thread.  I am also feeling incredibly aware of the mistakes in stitching on this piece where the black seemed a little more subtle.

More to come.  I still have a 2 1/2 hours of class left today.

Peace
-Mike

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