Dina at the Doodle

I had the pleasure of taking a Dina Wakely class last week at Whim So Doodle in St Pete. If you've never taken a class with Dina and ever get the chance, I highly recommend you do. Not only is Dina a great lady, but she's also a "no rules" sort too, which makes her A-OK in my book!! Also joining me was my new "craft class" buddy Donna Gibson and we got deliciously inky and painty together.

We made an interactive art journal-y piece that I finally got finished up yesterday. I find it quite amazing that some of my layers of paint from class over a week ago are still sticky. Hoping that as the acrylic cures that the sticky-tackiness goes away. The lady on the front is my first foray into Dina's "magic pencil" as she calls it. It's pretty cool in that it goes on like a pencil, but once you wet it, it turns into more like ink. The trick is not to wet all the lines but to leave some of them still looking like pencil. As we were finishing up for the night, Dina was telling us to make one something that would be the "flow" between all of our pages. She like circles. And she spotted a piece of art on the wall that had birds on it. And she said, "Take this picture. You think you can't draw but I bet all of you think this bird is cute. You can draw this bird. Just try it." So I did! He is the bird at the bottom right hand corner of the third picture. The little yellow one. So the birds are my "flow" from page to page. I came home and drew three different size birds. I cut them out and used them as a template and cut about a gozillion out of old book pages and a page that we also created in class with acrylic paint, spray inks and stencils. I used the magic pencil around them as well. There are also a few bird quotes on the pages. Dina uses a big loopy script on her art that you can kinda make out a word here and there, but not every word is meant to be read. So I tried to follow that lead and mine aren't necessarily going in the "right" direction, but that's the way I wanted it to be. Oh, and the orange piece on the second page? That spins and has four different stamped images around the circle.

Had a great time, Dina. Come back and see us soon!