We had a great turnout at our meeting yesterday with around 60 members attending. Your new Board members were all introduced, and we started a new segment by Christi Bunn to help members with questions about how to exhibit in a show. The most interest seemed to be in learning about all the new, and often confusing, social media. We will continue with that at future meetings.
Our first demo artist for the new year was your new president, award-winning scratch board artist Rick Plasters. There were many framed examples of his work that were passed around for close examination.
We like to show the palettes of our demo artists. Rick uses special Ampersand inks to color the scratched surface, mixed in a watercolor palette. It was his work surface, 
shown here, that was impressive. It stayed as organized as he is, in everything he does. We were amazed at the number of different implements he uses to scratch the Ampersand board.
Many of us had never seen an airbrush in use, so Rick brought his air compressor and sprayer to demonstrate its use to create either soft finishes or sharp clean lines. Rick often uses an airbrush for his beautiful backgrounds.
Thank you Rick!
Your new Board went from the meeting straight to a Board meeting where there was much discussion on the club survey and how to implement many issues and ideas from the members’ survey responses.
Click here to go straight to our club Facebook page to view a video of Rick demonstrating air brush.
Please help promote the club by liking and sharing:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/MountainBrookArtAssoc/
See you again, next Tuesday evening for another great demo. More about that tomorrow!
What other club do you know that can fill 138 shifts? It is absolutely amazing what this club can accomplish. Several of our members worked many shifts, up near eight shifts. A special thank you to Elaine Chambers, DeAnne Thorn, Lisa Pruitt, Sheila Cruz and Carol Schrading. The holiday show has always been the place to get to know other members, enjoy sharing art tips, watching the demos.
Jon Osbourne came to work carrying this great tote made from his own design. He readily shared the source and you can visit the site at society6.com/jonoart
For ten days the non-working furnace chased off customers too uncomfortable to browse for long. The economy tanked for two weeks and the Santa weekends were uncomfortably LOUD. Whew. It is difficult to make a direct comparison with previous years because we could only fit 2/3 of the number of exhibitors and didn’t have as much free space for hanging extra work. We were open longer but had shorter hours & no evenings. Some artists did very well. Rollina took top sales with her on-site portraits. She worked three afternoons every weekend.
