My Own Personal Santos: Part II

On Sunday, a group of us reconvened to finish making our Santos dolls that we had started the week prior. For our Sunday excursion, we all headed to Kitty's magnificent art barn in Helvetia. Pinch me.






Our day was filled with activity - finishing heads, assembling bodies, and finally dressing our ladies.








My lady.







One by one we completed our Santos dolls.




Aren't they lovely?




The artists:


New home:


For more information about our Santos dolls and to see more detailed work from the other artists, check out these blog posts:

Tory:

My Personal Santos
The girl with attitude goes first
Santos

Robin:

Santos Workshop

Paula:

Making Santos
Making Santos: Part II

My Own Personal Santos: Part I

I hardly know where to begin in describing this project, but it really started with my friend Stephanie who had a spark of an idea. Gaelyn Lakin, a member of the Portland Art Collective, recently had a show at Guardino Gallery in Portland. The show included several Santos dolls Gaelyn had created. I was fortunate to see the show in person and I was almost breathless with the beauty of Gaelyn's dolls. Well, Gaelyn will be moving soon to California so Stephanie asked Gaelyn if she would be willing to teach a group of artists how to make her style of Santos dolls; Gaelyn agreed and Stephanie arranged for about eight of us to meet at the 100th Monkey Studio in Portland. On the appointed day, we arrived with our numerous supplies and enthusiastic spirits. Tory, another member of the PAC, had already been playing around with her dolls and had taken Gaelyn's process and embellished upon it -- I won't give away any secrets because things will be happening with the Santos dolls -- but I will say that we spent the first day designing personal heads for our dolls. All of this is probably much more than necessary to introduce our dolls, but I wanted to share a bit of the background for how these lovely creations came to be. Because the process is so involved, we weren't even close to being able to finish up in the five hours we had the studio, so stay tuned for My Own Personal Santos: Part II.

Flinging Paint

I taught a five-hour class on visual journaling techniques last Saturday afternoon at Stampin' Cat Studio in Salem. The class had sold out weeks in advance so by the time Saturday afternoon rolled around, everyone was pretty excited to get started. And although we had five luxurious hours to create, the time seemed to just zip by and it was 6:00 before we knew it.

Preparing the class packets. I included all kinds of papers (ledger, phonebook, maps, music, joss, dress patterns, and a bit of braille), doilies, tickets, envelopes, tags, sequin waste, sandpaper, bubble wrap, and corrugated cardboard!


Ready for my students to arrive. I provided everything they needed for the afternoon - they only had to bring a journal designed for watercolor or mixed media work.



Some of the day's action:

Ooolala, it was a fun day!