More Master Class Camp with Eugena Topina

After having spent 2 days with Eugena Topina making those amazingly versatile stamping tools, I was pleased to have a second class with her.  Due to personal circumstances, one of the scheduled presenters was unable to attend, and Eugena graciously offered to teach a class to fill that void.  I'm delighted she did!  This class was a brand new one for Eugena, and took us off on an adventure with organic shapes and textures.  I've not done much work with organic shapes, so this class really helped me try something new.  Keep an eye on her website:  http://www.eugenascreations.com/  I'm sure she'll have a new tutorial for this process soon.  It's really fun and creative!
We started with white clay, though we could have used colors if we wished.  Knowing we would be colorizing things later was a good reason to stay with pale colors or white, especially for our initial experience with the process.    Eugena guided us through shape formation and introduced us to a myriad of texturing techniques.  Every design and texture in the pieces you see here was made by hand, following methods that Eugena has developed.  Most of them used everyday tools or items that would be easy to find.  Eugena is very imaginative.  The results were amazing and the whole process was a lot of fun!

After making several of the rounded shapes, and playing with various texture concepts, we experimented and created some shapes of our own.

On the second day of class, we dove into colorizing our pieces. As you can see in the last 2 photos here, I tried some organic shapes of my own and had a grand time with colors!  Thank you, Eugena, for a great class!

Coral Reefs with Jana Roberts Benzon

Jana Roberts Benzon is an amazing and creative polymer artist.  Her concepts, techniques, and ideas are always intriguing, and the projects we worked on at CFCF 2014 were no exception.  Much of what Jana does is organic, and always makes me wonder "how did she do that?"  She is a patient teacher, and makes everyone feel good about their efforts.

The all-day pre-conference workshop focused on a bracelet designed to look like a coral reef.  She taught us how to make a wide variety of sea shapes which we combined on a base.  Most participants used a bracelet cuff, though there were a few who used different base forms.  Each of the different sea shapes involved several steps, and we got to play with alcohol inks in a variety of applications.  It was great fun, and I really enjoyed seeing how the various shapes formed and evolved.
Included in this posting are shots of different sides of my bracelet cuff.  This should give you an idea of the variety of sea shapes we made.  My piece is rather jam-packed.  When I play with these shapes in the future, I'll probably make a pendant or pin of some sort, and spread things out a bit.