Teacher Spotlight... Helen Garcia!

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Teacher Spotlight... Helen Garcia!

This is just one of Helen Garcia's amazing projects from the amazing workshops she'll be teaching at our Kansas City, MO Art & Soul Retreat! We got to experience this class — Crinkly Iridescent Vestiges Quilt — in Portland and it was... amazing! This paper quilt is loaded with colorful crinkly textures. The paint and ink flowed into the crevices giving the papers a wonderful aged look. Students got to experiment with this special watermedia batik-like technique on Masa rice paper. They used an acrylic ink technique to make marks and paint with watercolor, letting the colors blend and fuse together naturally. Simply stunning!

Helen Shafer Garcia is a painter, mixed media artist and award winning illustrator. Her whimsical style shows a love for living creatively with a studio filled to the brim with found objects! She’s currently working with watercolor, pastel and mixed media creating contemporary images on paper along with a series of Icon folklore triptychs with wood, watermedia and found object construction.

For the past 20 years, Helen’s watercolor illustrations have graced the cover brochures, garden articles and advertisements of numerous International resorts and magazines. Awards include four San Diego Press Club First Place Awards of Excellence in Illustration for San Diego Home/Garden Lifestyles Magazine. Helen holds a BA degree in Fine Arts and currently teaches college level Watercolor and Acrylic painting, Book Arts, and Pastel.

Here's a sneak peek of what Helen will be teaching at our 2015 Kansas City retreat, which is just around the corner I might add!