Wednesday, November 16, 2011

New Cover and Other News

A recent search of Amazon showed that the new book is listed for pre-order, so I figure that I would share an image of the cover. The book should drop in July or August 2012. Can't wait.

As for other news, Dave and I have just wrapped up our busy fall with a weekend at the Virginia Art Education Association's Fall Conference in Roanoke, VA and another weekend at Art of the Carolinas in Raliegh, NC. The conference was great, and we conducted two presentations and two hands-on workshops. All were well attended, and we got a lot of positive feedback.

Art of the Carolinas was a blast, and our two workshops went very well. Strathmore Artist Papers sponsored the workshops and generously gave each participant one of their 9"x12" mixed media Visual Journals. They were more conceptual in nature, and we focused more on process than product. We even implemented a few new techniques that will probably become pretty standard in our workshops. One was the idea of stream of consciousness doodling. Similar to stream of consciousness writing, this creativity exercise enables one to let the ideas flow. Thanks to Strathmore rep Don Bradley for setting up the weekend for us.

Along with the workshops, Jerry's Artarama conducts a huge art sale filling a ballroom at the hotel with every conceivable art material. I took advantage of the discounted prices and picked up a 72 color set of Derwent's Inktense pencils. Similar to watercolor pencil, Inktense pencils are water-soluble ink pencils, and I have been having fun this week experimenting with them. Some of my attempts can be seen in the photo above.