Fodder School 3 - Early Bird Offer starts today!

Hello all! I'm dropping in to share the news that booking for Fodder School 3 opens today with a very special limited-time Early Bird offer  EDITED - Early Bird is over now, I'm afraid, but you can of course still sign up for the course at the regular price which - cards on table - is still an incredible bargain for what's on offer.

All the details for registration are coming up later in this post, as well as the trailer for Fodder School 3.  I couldn't be more excited about being a teacher on this year-long online mixed media art course.  There are so many adventures ahead.

And here's another little peek at what I'll be sharing during my month of classes...

Not only that, but there's a very special bonus... a brand new, original stamp set designed especially around this Fodder School 3 project, in collaboration with PaperArtsy, as well as sets of PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Chalk Paints that I've curated for painting botanical imagery... but more of those on Sunday! 

The Fodder Challenge has been a massive success with more than 17,500 participants.  What an incredible 12 days of creativity, inspiration, and connection.  It has been amazing seeing all the photos of fodder and being shared on Instagram #fodderchallenge and everywhere else. 

If you need extra time to catch up, the Fodder Challenge lessons will be available until August 4, 2022. If you still haven’t registered for this free event, you still can by simply clicking this link!  Yes, there's still time to find out how to create Floating Quotes of your very own... 

But now is the chance to follow through with those 12 teachers and spend a year diving deep into mixed media creativity. Fodder School 3 will be a year which will feed your creative spirit, add to your skill sets, and take you on journeys you haven't even imagined.

Even at full price it would be a bargain, but today Early Bird registration opens, and is available for the next five days, making it an even better deal.

All the details are further down this post...

But first let me share some more of what I've been creating inspired by the other teachers during the Fodder Challenge...

Day 7 - Gratitude Medals with Jennifer Wilkin Penick

You may recognise both the circles and the ribbons from the previous Fodder sessions... that's the joy of Fodder - you make it, and then you use it! But I did create new floating quotes for these, using some of Seth Apter's brilliant word stamps.

Day 8 - Tag Book with Megan Quinlan

Oh, I was in my happy place with this one... Megan offered up a brilliantly simple book structure, and shared her background technique, and then issued an invitation to play with theme, colour and imagery to suit ourselves.  Well, it was only ever going to be nature for me, wasn't it?!

Day 9 - Collaging with Christine Karpiak

Another lovely bit of creative playtime.  I started with paint-mixing tests I did before creating my Salty Rosemary project for the PaperArtsy blog recently, and they became the spines for the collaging in this series of five soothing panels (I was in need of some soothing by this stage of the game... the pace has been frenetic - in a lovely way, but frenetic nonetheless!)

One of the great joys for me of the whole thing has been taking the inspiration on offer and finding how it translates into my own palette of colours and styles.  It's given me a brilliant kick in the mojo, and I'm certain that the creative stimulation, joy, and discoveries will continue over the full year of Fodder School 3.

So how does Fodder School work?

The idea behind Fodder School is incredibly simple, yet the result is extraordinary.  On the first day of each month, a new instructor reveals a series of lessons and notes on handmade collage fodder creation. Then, two weeks later, lessons and notes on a big project using that collage fodder are available for you to watch.

You’ll also receive bonus lessons that arise spontaneously when this community of lifelong learners has something interesting to share, like a fresh take on the lessons of that month.

You’ll be part of a large community of makers sharing their Fodder School art on Instagram and in the optional private Facebook group. But of course you can choose simply to watch, learn and make without any pressure to interact at all, if that's the way you prefer it!

Fodder School lesson content is all pre-recorded, so you can work at your own pace, with “lifetime access.”  You'll also get lifetime access to all the classes from this year's Fodder Challenge - rather than losing them on August 5th.

What will I be sharing during my month of teaching?

Here are a few more sneak peeks of the Fodder School project I'll be teaching. In my classes alone, we'll be looking deep into nature, and playing with sketching, stamping, painting, house-building, and so much more!  I'm so looking forward to sharing my world of botanical sketching, 3D collaging, and of course my tiny houses.

Who else is teaching on Fodder School 3?

The twelve FS3 teachers are:

Alison Bomber @w0rdsandp1ctures

Barb Smucker @barbsmuckerstudio

Chris Karpiak @christinekarpiak

Di Venter @di.venter

Jennifer Wilkin Penick @jenniferwilkinpenick

Kecia Deveney @keciadeveney

Megan Quinlan @meganquinlanstudio

Sarah Gardner @juicy.s.art

Shay Kent @shaymichellestudios

Susanne Randers @mitkrearum

Tiffany Sharpe @tiffanysimplysharpe

Yetunde Rodriguez @yaytoonday

If you’d like more information, including biographies of all those creative artists, you can read all about it here.

What does it cost and when does it start?

The cost of Fodder School 3 is $237.00 USD + tax.  That really is incredibly good value for what you're getting - it works out at about $19.75 USD + tax per month for an amazing new course each month - delivered in two sets of classes. That's about €17.90 or £15.40 at current exchange rates.  Compare that to the individual cost of taking online mixed media art classes a la carte (estimated at $1,524.00 USD) and you'll see what incredible value Fodder School 3 offers.

And there's even more on offer than just the two sets of classes each month.  There will be bonus sessions cropping up throughout the year, as well as lots of introductory material already available to enjoy.

Once registered, you’ll have immediate access to Fodder School Orientation and lifetime access to Fodder Challenge 2023 (access to FC2023 will be directly inside of the FS3 classroom).

Fodder School 3 lessons begin on October 1, 2023 and run until September 30, 2024.  But as soon as you have access to the FS3 classroom, there are already fascinating Orientation videos available to watch, dealing with supplies and other helpful information, including one with me on paints and colour mixing - with its own little challenge included.

3,500 past students in Fodder Schools 1 and 2 can’t be wrong. Fodder School is an art course like no other, and I'd love you to come on this creative journey with us.  If you need a little more temptation, take a look at the Fodder School 3 trailer here.

I hope you all have a fabulous weekend, and I'll be back with some more creative inspiration soon.

You can be cautious or you can be creative, but there's no such thing as a cautious creative.
George Lois

Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.
Albert Einstein

A creative life is an amplified life. It's a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.
Elizabeth Gilbert

Rusted Texture Galore

Hello all!  Hope you've all been having a great week.  I'm here to share a project I created at a recent Andy Skinner workshop at Country View Crafts.

I think Andy's work and paint techniques are brilliant, and I've been lucky enough to go to a couple of his workshops over the years, though this was the first one for a while that has fitted into my schedule.

Although I was on the Design Team at Country View Crafts for a couple of years, this was the first time I've been to their lovely workshop venue.

I had a great time, and I'm sure it won't be my last visit now that I've worked out the trains aren't completely impossible.

We had a fantastic time trying out Andy's new Lava Paste by Cosmic Shimmer... it's astonishing how many different kinds of effects you can get, simply by applying it in different ways and in different thicknesses.










We were also exploring the new paint line Andy has with Cosmic Shimmer, and you'll see from the close-ups here that they achieve superb rusty effects over the wild and wonderful Lava Paste textures.













It's hard to believe that all this started with just two blank MDF panels.  They're quite heavyweight panels, really very pleasingly sturdy, and well able to cope with all the mixed media goodness about to come their way.

It's a large panel - the big base one is about 8 x 11.5 inches, so about the same as a piece of A4 paper.














We had an extra ATC-sized piece of MDF to practise on - here's the lava paste applied quite thickly with a palette knife...















... and here's what happens when you heat it with a heat gun!  (Sorry for the blur in the foreground, I didn't notice I had smeared my camera lens in all the excitement.)










And then we played with adding some of the new paints Andy has produced with Cosmic Shimmer.  I stuck to my trusted palette of Payne's Gray/Prussian Blue/Transparent Yellow Iron Oxide/Quinacridone Gold for my rusted look.











On the large piece, we had a choice of about ten different printed images to work with.

I went with this rather wonderful vintage song sheet cover.  

As you can see, it's for a song called Amanda, which is - as it says in the subtitle - a response to an earlier song by the same lyricist and composer called L'Amant d'Amanda.  (Yes, I had to come home and look it up - that's just the way I am!)












It's had various dirty washes of paint to make it look even more vintage and distressed, and of course there's some splatter too.







But the real point of this creation was the lava paste.  Just look at it bubbling up around the edges.

And right on the edge of the smaller panel, it's still the lava paste, but here applied much more thinly, and gently patted into place.  (Do click on these smaller photos for a closer look.)







I love the gritty look this gives you, just perfect for rusted textures.  









The nuts and bolts are just greyboard, believe it or not...

... with Andy's genius paint combinations added to give you the perfect rusted metal look.







You can probably tell that there's some corrugated cardboard offering up additional texture and dimension in the corners.















But it gets an extra distressed look from some more lava paste applied in places. 















I concentrated my Quinacridone Gold/Transparent Yellow Iron Oxide colours near these bolts so that they "drip" down to give an impression of realistic rusting patterns where water might drip and carry the rusty contagion.















Part of the joy of the lava paste is the randomness of the results.

You know approximately what you'll get from how you're applying it, but you're not in control of the specifics!
















We had a bit of time to spare at the end of the workshop, so we also had a play with the new Strata Paste on a little greyboard square.

This is about the size of an ATC, but not quite.









The Strata Paste has a wonderful stony texture like shale.

Quite apart from any regular crafting uses, I think it could be really useful for dollshouse work.

It was such fun to have a playful day following Andy's instructions without having to think too much.  I hope you enjoy the results as much as I do!

Thanks so much for stopping by today and I hope you all have a lovely peaceful Sunday.

It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.
Lord Byron

When butterfly met Papillon

Hello all!  I'm dredging up some fairly Ancient History again.  Recently I shared the altered book made during a fabulous weekend workshop with the amazing France Papillon back in November 2014, and in that post I mentioned that we'd done lots of other things with her too and that I'd try to track them down.

Well, by chance, the art journal I grabbed to bring with me to Columbus, Ohio, as part of my travelling stash is the one we got at that workshop and did some experimenting in.  It's the Ranger/Dylusions small journal, 8x5 inches.

While I was playing in it today, I thought I might as well grab some photos of some of the exploring we did over that weekend, so this post has more of what happened when butterfly met Papillon (which is French for butterfly, in case you didn't realise!).  I like some results better than others...






France explained how she often uses her journals just to find out how products will work together, so the early pages were our chance to mess around with some of the sprays and pastes and other toys she'd brought for us to play with.

(The trouble with sharing this now, of course, is that it's making me crave access to the many and varied products I have at home, whereas I've got to make do with my limited Ohio craft kit!)











There's more shimmer around than I'm used to working with, but it made such sense to play in this way - trying out some of my favourite colour combinations but in three different colour mediums over one page spread, and with different finishes.










Whilst I like the mysterious look of some of that shimmer over black gesso, especially with the added texture, it doesn't feel very me.

I'm an occasional user of black gesso, for sure, but in limited amounts, and it usually vanishes under layers and layers of other stuff.






This page spread feels a bit more like a butterfly one - from grass to sky, texture, crackle and text...

This was a chance to create with the products or effects we'd enjoyed the most so far, and I leapt at my often-favoured blue/greens (second only to the blue/browns here at Words and Pictures).






I enjoyed "messing up" the clean edges of the harlequin crackle texture - I think I was going off-piste with that, as is my wont in classes.














I really love the script stencil - might have to track that down and put it on the Christmas wishlist, I think.  And the spattery water droplets in the background do make me very happy.














I find myself quite taken with the level of shimmer here - as you know I love things that catch the light... I'm just not used to so much mica.  

I was in two minds about whether to share this next page - it took me a long way out of my comfort zone and I remain pretty ambivalent about the results.












France set up the process deliberately to take away our control.  On each table of crafters, we had to take it in turns to say what would be the next element added to the page, whether that was to use a specific colour, technique, or even a particular stamp.












As I've just mentioned, I really don't go for black in my crafting very much (it's even rare for me to stamp in black), so I was very resistant when somebody required the addition of the black stencilling.  I do like the spatter though.










We happened to have the lovely Magda Polakow at our table and this little Nina figure had just been released by Stampotique as part of her range of stamp designs.

It's not an image I would usually go for and again I was aware of a crunch of resistance in my spine, but what's a workshop for if not to try new things?  And I do now think she's pretty cute - if still not very me!











Orange is, if anything, even rarer than black here, and I nearly went nuts when I was only allowed to add my fabric texture to one side of the spread, which upsets my sense of balance.  So overall, this page feels a long way off from conventional "butterfly" creativity.  I don't know... what do you think?

Actually the quote on this page is very apt because, in being made to do this, I learned a lot about myself as a crafter.  My heart spoke loudly throughout, and I took good note of its protests for future reference!!









For the next page, France herself called out the stages.  She kept it much vaguer - add texture, add colour with sprays, add some stamping - so it was possible to be both out of control of the process but also make it feel like one's own work.












Given I'm known also as butterfly, and given the workshop was being run by France Papillon, it seemed only right that they should be my featured theme on these pages.














Lots of my other usual suspects are here too - lots of texture, as well as lots of text...












...tissue wrap, lovely inky blues and greens...

(I love these Stampotique hearts, which I do actually own, but they're only rarely inked up - time to change that when I get home eventually.)












... some metal and some book page scraps...

Definitely a good sentiment for the weekend!












And the tiny bright red heart is a deliberate homage to France's own work - she very often uses one as an accent in her beautiful journalling.

Sadly my train home was booked at a time which meant I had to leave before the very last exercise of the day, in which France was making the group create to classical music without any chatting at all - something I'd have loved to do... though, of course, to be honest, it's how I create almost all the time, so it would hardly have been new to me!!









It was an absolute joy to meet France Papillon in person.  She's been a huge inspiration to me online, and the chance to take part in a whole weekend of playing with her was fantastic.

There are some (as yet unfinished) ATCs hanging around somewhere in my craft room from the same workshop.  If I ever get them done, I'll share those too!




Thanks so much for stopping by today.  I'll be back in a few days with the new page spread I've just been working on in this same art journal, and then at some point I hope to catch you up with some more of my real-life travels.  Shanghai (from back in February this year - I'm a long way behind!) should be our next port of call for that, so I'll hope to see you again soon.

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
Kahlil Gibran