SPRING FLING 2023
New lessons released each weekday throughout April 2023 with full access to replays through December 31, 2023.
Here’s the preliminary Line Up of Workshops for Spring Fling!
THE WORKSHOPS:
LIVE ON ZOOM! The Power of Black and White with Kelly Schaub 
By simplifying our color palette, we will create monochrome collages that emphasize contrast, value, shape, and line. By eliminating color from the equation, we can focus on our subject matter, and our craft, as we create bold collages that highlight form, texture, markmaking, and technique.
The joy of the mess: a kinesthetic approach to collage with Melissa Fristrom
When you were a kid did you like to play in the mud and muck or sit on the sidelines and watch?
Do you miss the wild abandon of being a child?
How many parts of your body have you used in collage?
Come embrace the joy of the mess. Create a space to be messy and enjoy the process of making art without worrying about the end product. By trying new approaches, with the freedom of making a mess, you will explore and experience new ways of creating art that you can translate back to your more traditional art. Leave the workshop ready to experiment with new messy techniques.
Stepping into the Unknown: Collage, Storytelling, and Fantasy with Leah Peterson 
Come visit Jinivar with me! In this workshop, I’ll introduce you to a year-long (and still ongoing) project and discuss some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Jinivar is an imaginary world populated with people, flora, and fauna that I create using collage techniques and mail out as postcards. I’ve created and mailed over 100 unique postcards, each with a collaged image on one side and a (very short!) story about the person, place, or thing on the other. All the images and stories are published on my website. The workshop will explore the project from a few different angles from creating the collages and stories and converting them into postcards, to the distribution online and through the mail. In addition to some ideas for projects along the way, all participants will be invited to send me their own Jinivar postcard, which I will post on the website, and receive one of mine in return.
LIVE ON ZOOM! Typography: I Have No Words… with Darlene Sardinsky
What is typography? It is the arrangement, style, printing and appearance of typefaces. What is collage? It is both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other memorabilia are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface. For this workshop we will combine the two in a way that you may not have thought of before. We will interpret the typography as forms rather than letters and movement rather than words. We will create visuals using negative and positive space that will allow you to think differently about the typography you experience every single day, I have no words.
Daily Collage Deities with MJ Connors Davison
Let’s re-examine the days of the week to create our own personal collage deities!
Using a portrait format, we’ll each compose our deities based on the ancient associations of planets in our solar system with days of our week.
A grid of golden proportions will set the sure foundation for our collage layerings. Then, gods and goddesses of the planets, each having their particular characteristics and colors, will be presented.
Choose from the sun of Sunday, through those of the weekdays, to the Saturn of Saturday, and create a collage of the deity that most wishes to come through you and be of special reference.
Start Your Stash with Liz McEntee
Do you have ephemera envy? Do you have a paper predicament? Do you wonder how other collage artists find gorgeous and unusual papers? Do you feel some supplies are too precious to use? Are you waiting until you are making “great” art to use your best ephemera?
In this class, I will share the story of how I began my image collection. I will take you on virtual field trips to different locations to find interesting papers. We will discuss
different methods of sorting and storing. I will encourage using our most precious papers with ideas to remove anxiety. The best supplies are the ones we use, fearlessly and playfully. Join me as we allow our curiosity to seek out our stash and use our courage to use our treasures.
From Paper Cut-Outs to Instagram Fame with Tatiana Almond
A number of simple and effective tips on how to play around and find out — what is your personal voice and how to enjoy building a community of friends, instead of “work hard to get new customers”.
Story Boxes with Marianne Burger
Small images are rarely considered or all together discarded as being too fussy for cutting and often blends into the background without making any visual impact.
In this class I will show you how working small can pack a big punch too using a simple matchbox as our stage. I will share a few tried and tested techniques for cutting out small imagery without the apprehension or frustration before we carefully assemble a miniature composition with a sense of wonder and playfulness inside the tiny matchbox frame. Completing our tucked away collage will be a simplistic line of found words to complete our poetic story box.
Mini Abstracts with Kelly Schaub
A mini course to explore abstract mixed media collage, combined with the tack iron method will yield creative compositions and a new way of working.
LIVE ON ZOOM! Rules – Meant to be Broken? with Leah Peterson
In this workshop we’ll explore how much structure helps our creativity and when it gets in the way. Do you knowingly create rules and parameters to follow with your art-making? Do you embrace guidelines or go out of your way to break every rule you find? We’ll start out by collectively bringing to light some of the rules we love – and hate – and give shape to what our rules-following personality might be. We’ll also do a little searching to see what rules we might be imposing on ourselves that we haven’t given conscious thought to and determine whether they’re helping or hindering (never put people in a collage upside-down – is that a rule?). And finally, which rules do you always break–maybe how long you actually take on a “5-minute collage” warm-up, or a self-imposed rule of starting and finishing with a clean desk (I made that one up, does anyone use that rule?), or impossible to keep schedules like making 50 pieces a month. As you can see, the term “rules” is being used here to include any restrictions we place on ourselves or what we make and could be about how we work, when, where, or what we make. Throughout the workshop we’ll test out some rules on the spot – silliness may ensue. Come ready to jump right in and leave with some collage starters for your next project.
LIVE ON ZOOM! Prompted Postcards with Marianne Burger
For this class we will use my personal “deck of prompts” to facilitate the interpretation of various elements to be used for composing a Postcard.
We will draw 5-6 cards from the deck depending on the cards drawn or grant anyone another opportunity to add one or two extra elements.
1st card will determine background (grid/solid & the color scheme) on which the collage will be composed. The next cards will be drawn together and be discussed amongst the participants for interpretation and ideas before everyone will have some time to complete their composition. This will also give students the freedom to layer elements.
Image Transfer Tips & Techniques with Kelly Schaub
We will play with all sorts of image transfer techniques and add these images to our collage and mixed media works. There is an art and a science to successful image transfers. The key word here is experiment, and we will liken these demos to a science lab. Not every technique will work every time, but if we take notes about the exact process, we can discover our favorite effects and try to replicate them. Each technique will create a different “look” and “feel” to your image transfer. And each technique will give different results based on the source image you are transferring.
LIVE ON ZOOM! Paper Glue to Social Glue: Organize Your Collage Event with Tatiana Almond
Don’t wait for a collage community to come around: create it! What if besides being a collage artist you can host the meetings, or even become a leader of a collage club in your city? I’ll share almost 10 years of my experience in organizing collage events: not only workshops and lectures, but also wine evenings with freestyle cutting and pasting & collage swaps.
Dreamy Landscapes: Creating Unity & Depth with Jen Blalock
Create believable fantasy landscapes through unity and depth! Search for foregrounds, middle grounds, and backgrounds to form your world using the five methods for creating the illusion of depth: overlapping, size, detail, position, and color/value. Color will tie the whole composition together and build a dreamworld that looks seamless and harmonious, perfect for meditating on dreams and creating new stories.
Soul Symbols: Mining the Everyday to Transform the Ordinary into the Sacred with Jen Dykeman
“Art is not about art. Art is about life,” said Louise Bourgeois. Collage artists literally pour bits and pieces of their lived experience into each work, sometimes in the tiniest bits and shards. In that way each work is a distillation of a visual life lived. If you sit quietly and wait recurring images present themselves as your unique visual language. Let’s play with those images that stay with us a bit longer and present themselves over and over. Let’s be curious!
Let’s explore together and mine the bits and pieces. Art Critic Jerry Saltz said, “Every time you add something to our work you have also taken something away.” Psychologist Carl Jung’s seminal work “The Red Book” took him 16 years to create and stayed hidden in a Swiss bank vault after his death in 1961. It took another 16 years to translate into English and even longer to get published. It was Jung’s life-long voyage into self-discovery.
Let’s take an inside journey to explore our: Senses, Symbolism, Symmetry and Sacredness.
Stitch Up Your Collage with Maureen Lardie
Yes, you can sew with thread on paper!
Stitching onto a collage is a wonderful way to add additional lines, textures, or design elements. We will explore ways to add thread to our collage work using pre-planned holes, easy embroidery stitches, and embroidery floss. Whether a piece is abstract, representational, or something in between, it is possible to use this technique to add an unexpected detail.
No sewing experience required!
Reels 101: A Peek Behind the Curtain with Kat Fristrom
Do you shake at the mention of technology?
Have you ever wished you could post videos on Tik Tok and Instagram?
Are you excited to share behind the scene stories for your fans?
Come learn the basics of making a video that would impress even the most discerning audience– a teenager. Learn how to take engaging videos that highlight your unique process. Explore editing software that will improve your video. And understand the difference social Tik Tok and Instagram. Leave the workshop ready to share the excitement of your art process.
From Box to Book with Darlene Sardinsky
Love the earth? Show it how much you care by repurposing your boxes into books. Your recycle bin is overflowing with boxes that you recycle, but why not turn them into gorgeous books to keep your art in, give as gifts or admire on your shelf? While you’re in there, take out your envelopes, stamps, colorful paper, used magazines, etc. You get the picture…we’re going to have fun repurposing everything with some yarn, scissors and a glue stick. Get ready to impress yourself and step outside the box with me.
LIVE ON ZOOM! Falling Down the Rabbit Hole of Encaustic Wax with Melissa Fristrom
Have you ever wondered about that Encaustic Wax thing everyone is talking about?
Do you want to peer into the world of Encaustic Wax before leaping?
Is adding an ethereal medium to your collage of interest?
Come join me for an hour of colorful fun. We will explore what is necessary for dipping your toe into the possibilities of encaustic wax. Set-up, techniques, and resources will all be available. And because it is live on Zoom, you can ask any questions you want.
Resin Collage in a Box with Kelly Schaub 
Take your collage to a whole new level with resin. The shiny, durable surface adds a level of sophistication to a simple paper collage. We’ll box in our collages in this fun and easy process that you will want to use again and again.
