Metal Art Class

My good art friend Verna turned me on to this class today. It's a class in metal crafting. I've been looking forward to it for several weeks, because after I first signed up, the instructor, Karen Brooks, had a family emergency and had to cancel it. She rescheduled it for today, but only three students were able to come. This meant we all got a lot of attention. Besides Verna, the other student was Don, who does some other kind of art work which I haven't looked up yet. But I got up late this morning, and while I had planned to walk three miles on the way to the class, I fooled around and didn't leave home until 8:45. We were supposed to be there before the 9:30 start time, but I met my chatty neighbor Bill on the way, so I was a bit late. The class was in the brickhouse which is an art gallery and studios in Oak Park.
Karen set us up with sandpaper and steel wool and we took our pieces ofmetal out into the courtyard to sand and smoothe them. We worked for about two hours, preparing our metal pieces and then coating them with various liquids, like copper, patina, rust-producer, gesso, and alcohol inks. We got kind of bogged down when some of the products didn't quite perform as they should have -- noticeably the rust didn't rust enough.

Our day actually included a wonderful lunch made by Karen and served al fresco. We had veggie enchiladas, jicama salad and chips, a beer drink called sangria that was really good and margarita pie. And I think I'm sticking to my diet if I just don't have chocolate. Ha.
After we had our wonderful lunch, we went back into the studio and learned how to emboss, affix various things to metal, and apply leafing and similar things. In other words, I had a good time and learned a few new things.

Now that we've cleaned everything up, I thought I'd take a picture of the whole group in the working area. Can't believe I didn't remember to do this before. I'm not sure I'll do much more with this, though I did like the techniques, but it involves buying a lot of products I don't currently have, so while I would definitely take another class, I think maybe it would be nice if there were just some follow-up workshops where we could use her studio and pay for the use of supplies, etc.



I have gotten up early every day this week, and it's catching up with me. It's only 1:30 a.m. and I'm falling asleep sitting here, and don't feel like proofreading, so I'm going to bed.