This weekend was the WSO Spring Convention in Newport, “Making Waves”. My mom lives down there, so I had been really looking forward to this convention.

I had originally intended to take the workshop with the juror (Gale Webb), but with my new job I was unable to take the time off. Ms. Webb is an acclaimed watermedia artist; she does a variety of collage, watercolor, gauche, acrylic, stamping, and anything else that strikes her fancy. I felt like this workshop would get me experimenting a little bit more, and I was disappointed not to be able to attend.

This convention turned out to be a pretty adequate substitution. Through Ms. Webb’s critiques and demo I got a good idea of her process and style; while I’m sure I would have really enjoyed the workshop, I still have lots to think about.

In addition, I took two break-out sessions. One was on shell printing, backgrounds, and “chopping” (creating a stamp for your signature).

The second break out session was on “Gelli-printing“. I recently purchased one, but I hadn’t had much of a chance to experiment with this. The teacher gave some great examples and demos and this information will give me a lot to think about. When I sit down and create some papers, I’ll combine them with my marbling papers and we’ll see what happens.

After the sessions I took the dogs (Finn and Wilson who was visiting) to the beach.

It was a good weekend. Now I just need to get down to doing some [art] work!