Get Wet

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambitions. -Abraham Lincoln

Get Wet! Watercolor Canvas Book Lisa Engelbrecht Watercolor canvas is a new way to paint on a canvas surface that gives the watercolor look of paper. This special canvas is raw on one side and gesso primed on the other-both sides take all media, watercolors, acrylics, and oils very well. I love the way the canvas makes beautiful washes that are amazing backgrounds for letters, collage and journaling. In this workshop we will create a canvas paged book with this stuff-the pages from pads are cut already and are a good weight so we can begin creating quickly. The artist will explore various wash techniques as backgrounds-using watercolors, water soluble oil pastels and acrylic inks. This canvas does not buckle! Various wash techniques covered will include lifting pigments, wet-on-wet, wet on dry, and recovering highlights. Oil pastels and other media will be combined to create interesting effects, Scraffitto-or scratching into the washes while wet and dry will also add a dimension to the work. Stencil and stamping will add depth too. After these pages are dry we can add collage elements and letters. Mark making tools and pens work well on the canvas. Sewing and stitchery will also work! Two Canvas Boards will form the covers of the book and a simple binding will pull it all together. The artist will examine the use of the white space, the design of the page and the flow of the book as he or she creates-however alot of the creating here will be intuitive (We’ll discuss trusting this intuition alot in class)

Lisa Engelbrecht is a California lettering artist who fell in love with fabric, married her two passions,( letters and fibers) and now works in both media with glee! She teaches classes with an emphasis on creativity and believes in the artist in us all. Her work can be seen in many magazines and books and she also works for American Greetings as a freelance artist. www.lisaengelbrecht.com