Last Saturday was a big treat for all of us who attended Ingrid Ellison’s very fine workshop, Renewing the Muse.  Over the course of 6 hours, Ingrid took us through many of the techniques she uses to push her ideas into new art works, new territory, and out of patterns that are old and no longer useful.

As always, Ingrid brings buckets of materials for experimentation, a wonderful handout full of word and design exercises, and lots of enthusiasm for inspiring everyone to shake out of old habits, or ways to ignite some new passions.

We explored word mapping and using language to create images, changing the scale in our work, and exposing the negative shapes of what we see near and far.

Through a series of color exercises, Ingrid asked us to consider how to get the most out of our color choices by expanding our ability to find more color possibilities, and to feel competent at mixing tones of one base color.  We also began to identify themes, which is Ingrid’s preferred way of using her visual journals. No matter how much experience each of us had, we each were able to uncover some new directions for our journaling, mixed media, illustrations, and art making.

And then we had fun with gold and silver leaf!