Over the weekend I took the afternoon to to a semi-local studio tour of 9 artists.
Luckily the weather co-operated and it was a nice day out. (Sitting in the tour van and getting up and out all the time was torture, for me though. I managed to injure my tailbone slipping on the step and bouncing on my tail down to the concrete pad.)
The first stop was a charming pottery/painting studio. The artist uses her painting skills to decorate her pottery work. lovely fruit and floral themes on all amnner of pottery creations.
The next artist raises alpaca and uses their wool to create luxuriously soft knits, and amazingly soft stuffed animals. Here is an alpaca mom and her baby.
Some of the alpaca items, hats, scarves, mitts, sweaters, stuffies ect..
Elaine was part of the tour as well with her polymer clay work, but alas, there were too many admirers at her display to get a good photo.
Here we have a fibre artist, she mostly does various dye and dye techniques, but she also does amazing quilting work, which wasn't displayed. as well as photography of local wildlife which she uses in her cards and prints.
Another artist has her studio on her farm in a nice sized building, huge windows and wall to wall paintings and artworks. She does acryllic and water color painting, felting, all sorts of different needle works, everything really.
The same artist as above. I had to show this dragon, all needleworked in gold thread, beads and sequins, the details are amazing. It took her 2 weeks of 10-12 hr days to stitch this gorgeous and priceless work. I drool, seriously.
This pottery artist is very different from the first one, the patterns in her work are more textural, though there were a few painted pieces. She also does amusing little faces, and "mosquitoe house" garden decorations.
The last 2 artists are a husband and wife team who have thier studios in the basement of an old old schoolhouse they have renovated. The live in the upper floor.
She does plaster casting impressions of nature scenes, animal tracks, feathers, different plantlife ect.
This one is a huge casting of a busy gopher area, full of rodent tracks.
Her husband does black and white classic photography using a bellows style camera, which my photo didn't turn out of, sadly. lots of nature scenes, and he does images in a totally darkroom, slowexposure where he runs a flashlite around the subject and ends up with a wild light outlining the photo subject.
It was a really fun and busy day seeing all the different local artisans, and their equally different studio areas. So much talent, and so much inspiration. I hope they do a tour next year too!
