Back from Dallas
This past weekend I taught a workshop in for the chapter in Dallas, TX. I packed my studio up, taking most of my pencils and crayons, brushes and paper and took the plane down to Dallas, looking forward to meeting fresh faces and past friends.
While in Dallas I stayed with a wonderful couple, Toni and Ken Wengler. They are splendid hosts and made me feel right at home; fed me healthy food and kept me on schedule. Toni is a sweet and loving woman, a talented artist, and makes great brownies. They both showed me around Dallas a bit, let me lap up some sunshine that has been missing in Michigan and took me out to dinner. Toni did her best to get some Texas chic into my wardrobe, culminating in a new purse that will definitely get some comments!
Workshops are hard work. They take planning to prepare for, and energy to teach. But I love teaching them. Something happens in a good workshop. Most everyone there is trying something new by diving into unknown waters in an attempt to widen their horizons. In some way a Synergy takes hold in the room while the artists experiment and take the plunge into unknown territory. We laugh at silly mistakes, outright catastrophes cause funny comments and more laughter while most learn how to keep away from the blunder on the second or third try. Even those that will not use the techniques put forth when they get home will usually encounter something in a workshop that will come in handy in the future.
In my opinion, teachers should always go into a workshop thinking how they can improve upon their techniques plus pay attention to better ways to teach the students those skills-- even learn from the students themselves. Likewise, a student should enter with an open frame of mind that they are going to have fun, experiment for a few days or hours, and see what will happen. Both parties should go into the whole event with a sense of humor and a willingness to learn.
As any artist that works in Colored Pencil will tell you, one of the hardest things to do is let go and experiment. We are generally a tight group, meaning we like control, we like to know what is going to happen with the next layer of color, and we hold our breaths when we go out of our own little boxes. Because of this we sometimes forget that art is supposed to be fun, we are even supposed to enjoy the whole process. Since this technique is quite new to most, it leads to some consternation when things don’t happen just as they thought they should, and laughter when they are disastrous. But we all find out that the world did not end, the earth still spins on its axis, and your box just expanded when you weren’t even thinking about it! What serendipitous fun!
