An Evening with Sept Apter

I met Seth Apter in June at Create NJ.  Unfortunately, I wasn't in any of his classes.  I had wanted to take his Text Tiles class, but the time slot was the same as the Banner Wrap Beach class I was taking with Andrea.  When our class was over, I snuck into Seth's class and was in awe of everyone's beautiful work!  I was talking with Seth and found out that he lives locally in NYC!  I begged him to teach this class somewhere in the city, and luckily, Michele from Little Bird Creations (a Meetup group) scheduled him to teach this class at her little studio in the Upper West Side!

Not only was this a fantabulous class, but I got to hang out with some art friends from the Tim Holtz cruises (Eileen & Pat), but I finally got to meet the very talented and sweet Heidi Bound, who is a friend of theirs, and I always heard so much about her.  I also got to meet Michele (our lovely host), Rosie, Violet, Teri, and some other talented ladies.

I never took any kind of art classes in high school, and I've always been more of a crafter.  In the last 12 years or so, I've been mostly paper crafting, and that led me to mixed media.  Between my classes at Create and this one with Seth, I now have a much better understanding of the use of Gesso and Acrylic Glazing Liquid and liquid acrylic paints (not the kind from the craft stores!  lol).  Here's what I made ...

Seth aptly titled this class Text Tiles, not only because they're 'tile-like', but also the addition of added rub-on letters.  Anyone who knows me knows I love anything to do with text, fonts, lettering (I was a typesetter for 15 years).  He also encouraged us to try using rubber stamps, stencils, or anything else our little creative minds could conjure up, but I was so into the text!



 

Since this was my first real class learning how to use liquid acrylics and layering colors, I wanted to stress that in my text.

 



I started with the smaller piece, so when I was ready for the rub-ons for the larger piece, I felt (get-it?) I really wanted to emphasize the word feel, so when I got home, I used some foam letters and stamped using super heavy gesso.  I wanted it to be textured, and this stuff is really thick!

I hung my text tiles on my growing wall-o-art in my classroom/studio.  More details of that in tomorrow's post.

 

Here's some pics of the master at work ...

 

And some pics of the gals creating ...

And some great pics of some artsy friends ...