yet another thing to love about dina wakley...

...is her amazing skill as a teacher. if you ever get a chance to take one of her classes, GO! you will not be sorry, i promise. i've actually been lucky enough to do so twice, the most recent being last month when the lovely sandi taloumis and i met up in new york to spend the day at the ink pad's teaching annex with the divine dina and about 20 other awesome artsy ladies. the most important thing to know is that dina is as ♥FUN♥ and funny as she is talented-- which is definitely saying something!-- so you might be enjoying yourself so much you don't really notice that she also has a proper lesson plan, a bunch of tasks for you to try, a LOT of cool knowledge to impart, and the professionalism to it make all work in the allotted time without ever calling attention to the fact that you're not all just blissfully and aimlessly playing around. it's very impressive!

one of my favorite things we learned is a technique dina calls "trace face" in which each member of the class created a unique portrait using the same photocopied face and... wouldja believe... carbon paper of all things! you would think such an experiment would result in two dozen pictures that looked exactly the same, but NO, every single one was different and amazing! i've been playing around with this method ever since; most recently i've used it on top of a background of somewhat randomly glued vintage paper bit that i created for the "diva" theme at collage obsession:

collage made of cut and torn vintage paper bits from my stash; stencils: heidi swapp, ranger, julie balzer; stamps: dina wakley, glitz design; inks: ranger archival and distress in various colors plus colorbox chalk inks for facial features; other: black stabilo pencil, staples brand carbon paper

here it is again, alongside the vintage vogue magazine model i used as my tracing image; i have to say i feel like i didn't do well on the mouth, but otherwise i'm pretty happy with this one:

meanwhile, here is my face from class, which i also really love. i should probably mention that the darkest lines on all of these pages are made using my new favorite tool, a black stabilo pencil smudged lightly with a wet paint brush, the results are soooooooooo cool!

as it turns out, you can use this technique with ANY image, it doesn't have to be a face. a couple of weeks ago, i traced an avian friend from a vintage bird book on top of a random painty background i made in class and it turned out well enough that i made it into a card for my mom:

so to sum up: if you ever happen to see the words "dina wakley" and "teaching a class near you"... drop everything and go sign up immediately. you can thank me later, darlings! :)