At the beginning of November, on my way up to Yorkshire, I was lucky enough to attend a fabulous 3 day workshop: ‘Mixed Media, Whimsical Collage Circus’ organised by Art Workshops and led by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer and Nathalie Kalbach.
It was a residential workshop held in the Holiday Inn in Coventry and there were about 36 attendees.
We were 6 to a table. Look at the contents of the goody bag that greeted us
The organisation was superb, and Nathalie and Julie are excellent tutors.
They would first do a demo
Then we would go back to our tables with a simple set of instructions and create.
One of the first exercises was mark-making
No paint was to be wasted – to clean our brushes we used up any excess paint on newspaper and old book pages.
See the wonderful creative flurry on our table
The best thing was that we were only given about 5 – 10 minutes to do each exercise – no time to think, just paint – it freed me up so much.
At this stage we were creating papers we would later be using in collage.
Gosh it was fun!
Julie and Nathalie both create a range of foam stamps that were there for us to excperiment with
We could also buy packs of them, 
but by the time I had decided which ones I would like, they had been snapped up!
There was an amazing array of art supplies in the ‘shop’ and lots of shopping going on!
It is hard to know which ones to buy before using them – this one of Nathalie’s turned out to be one of my favourites. She had made a book with each of her Foamies stamped as a simple repeating pattern
The fun comes when you use the stamps over other layers of paint. Here’s what happened when I started to play with it
The trouble is I like it too much to tear it up for collage. You know that feeling I’m sure.
We did some fun exercises and had lots of laughs – at the end of the three days we all had 12, 6″x6″ collages to take home.
I will tell more in a future post, but in the meantime, Julie created a Vlog about her whirlwind trip to Ireland and Coventry which includes our workshop (starts at about 18.40 minutes in) – she has such energy!
Happy crafting!
Ravelry
Wild Daffodil 
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