The Teewinot art retreat went so well, I decided to do another more local to me. And I think I’ll keep doing these. I stayed at the YMCA in Estes Park and spent a long weekend drawing, painting, doing crafts 🙂

The YMCA has a whole craft center and you can make glass items! I broke up pieces of glass and put them in this mold, and then they put it in the kiln for me. It was fun! And shiny! And breaking the glass wasn’t as scary as I thought. They had a tool that was like pliers, and I was working with really small pieces, so there weren’t any crazy explosions of pieces. Once I got home, I made my pendant into a bolo tie.

And I found a quilt in the Visitor Center! This is “Friends” by Darcy Love, 2003.

I did a lot of drawing from my car, because it was very cold and my hands wouldn’t work outside.

Since it was so cold, I decided to see if I there were any art activities in Estes Park, like galleries or something. And I found Inspired Art Experiences! They have a bunch of different crafts you can learn, much like a sip-and-paint but for lots of different things. I did an alcohol ink lightbox as a gift for my friends, a batik, and woodburning!

The alcohol ink was a bit stressful since I was trying to depict an actual figure, their bird, and the ink moves very quickly. I think it would have been less stressful if I was just trying to make a cool background or fun color blending thing.

The batik was also a bit stressful, the wax came out really fast onto the fabric, so I had to move quickly. But it was fun! I did a batik at an art camp back in elementary school, so this was a fun callback. The teacher described it as making a coloring page for yourself, which it was – the wax separated the different zones, and then she showed me how to “color” it in with fabric dye. I enjoyed that part much more, just playing with color blending, almost exactly like watercolor “wet on wet” technique. And now it hangs in my kitchen, I’m quite pleased.

Then I did woodburning! This was very slow and meditative, and smelled amazing. It was essentially slow drawing. The tool was just a fat pen with a HOT tip on the end, and I liked finding the different pressures and speeds to do the shading and hard lines. I was also very happy that the teacher came back and was like “oh I like your Long’s Peak” – always satisfying to have people see the thing I’m trying to depict. 🙂

Overall, 10/10, will art retreat again.