Every year for the past four years, I’ve been attending an art retreat in Columbus, OH called Artiscape. It’s a great mixed media art retreat put together by Lisa Ohmer of European Papers and the variety of classes runs the gamut of paper art to metalsmithing. This year’s theme was Venetian Nights and due to only having 5 days of vacation this year, I went for three days instead of my usual four. It meant fewer classes but I was grateful just to be able to go at all.
This year’s theme was Venice Unmasked! and I desperately wanted to create some artist trades to give out to people. I’d never been able to make any the previous years and so I had never been able to receive all the beautiful art everyone else had made.
In the end, I ended up with little wooden masks that I laser cut, sanded, and stained.
I decorated one in particular and entered it into the Art Trades contest and it ended up winning in the Art – Miscellany category!
Better than that though was all the cool little pieces of art I was able to trade for those masks. This is just from the first day of trading! I really enjoyed all the effort people took to make these.
In addition the the trade contest, I made an entry for the auction which included a green beaded crown, a sea themed beaded bracelet and a decorated frame with a poem I wrote about the pieces.
Well, there was a bit of a bidding war at the end between a wedding and prom and the pieces ended up getting the highest bid of the silent auction. It was pretty neat to find out the crown was going to be used in a wedding ceremony! 
But beyond all that were the classes. I was only able to take three this year and I was not very good at taking pictures but here are a couple of pictures of some of the things I worked on.
This is polymer clay! With some transfer foil and a texture I rolled onto it. I was sort of mesmerized by the foil transfer technique but overall, I’d say that polymer clay is not really my bag of tea. But I did buy a finished piece from the instructor at the art fair on Sunday which is so detailed that I really do appreciate the art and skill involved in polymer clay art. 
Overall a great weekend and I didn’t even mention the group dinners, the marketplace, and all the wonderfully artistic people I got to spend time with. A great weekend and I’m looking forward to 2017’s event!
