THE DONNA DOWNEY EXPERIENCE

Well, we had quite the weekend in San Antonio, Debbie and I. How could it fail to be fun, when one's instructor shows up with turquoise-tipped hair? Of course, Debbie sat with her phone right in front of her the whole time, in case her daughter should call to say she was in labor, but that just added to the excitement.

Donna has a fabulous shop and studio of her own in North Carolina, but she also teaches all over the world. She taught three classes for us, each three to five hours long, and for each one we received a packet full of fun "ingredients", such as this one for our Vintage Chic cardboard mini album.

Now, I am not a scrapbooker (that's what my blogs are for), so this was the project I was least enthusiastic about. However, I must admit, it was kinda fun. We were told to make copies of some of our own photos and bring them with us, to go in this album. I thought black and white photos would look best in it, and since the only ones I have were from our time in Southeast Asia, that is what I brought.

Since Donna is a big fan of tucking bits of old book paper into her projects here and there (you can see it peeking out around the edges of the pages), she tears out pages from old paperbacks she has finished with, and tucks several into each packet she assembles. How bizarre is it then, that the one packet I chose, just happened to hold pages from a book that took place in Southeast Asia, and my album now has words like Borneo and kampung peeking out everywhere!

The next morning we came in to find a huge mound of handmade, cloth-bound journals stacked on a table, and it was quite the free-for-all when she told us all to scramble for whichever one we liked best. I sat back and waited, not wishing to get mauled, but was quite tickled with my green polka dots, since I keep all my journals and sketchbooks stacked in an old painted chair that is just that color. Unlike our first class, this journal was not a project meant to be completed in a few hours. It was just a place for us to experiment with all the different techniques that Donna was throwing at us. Many pages were still blank when we left, some were going to be backgrounds that we would journal on when the mood hit, and still others would probably get gessoed over and repainted. In the picture below, we were dropping globs of India ink on our pages, then blowing on them with a straw, to make them branch out over the page. There are two reasons that I am semi-hysterical in this photo. One is that this technique can cause you to hyperventilate. Seriously. Second is that Donna had just told us "there you go ladies, now you know how to do a blow job." I came dangerously close to snorting ink back up through the straw.

My ink blot page, which I added a face to when I decided it was shaped like a bat.

The last class was all about Pan Pastels, which are a creamier version of pastels, without as much dust, and which come in little compact-like containers. I had bought several different colors for one of my on-line classes, but we had only touched on the subject briefly, then I'd hardly used them since. We painted this entire 11x14 canvas using nothing but the pan pastels (well, except for that tiny bit of stamp pad embellishment at the end) and now I really, really love them.

Wish I had more time to let the whole experience soak in and get processed, but tomorrow morning John and I will be heading down to Houston for his first visit with the hypertension specialist. His cardiologist warned us not to expect any "magic bullets", and we don't, but it sure would be nice if they could at least come up with a drug combination which wouldn't have the poor guy feeling so draggy-assed all the time. Fingers crossed ever-buddy!