Life Book 2016 The Tam Edition

Lesson projects & themes:

• The Happy Traveller – Create a front-facing girl (your ‘Happy Traveller’ – see image above) with 1 or more ‘sacred soul animals’ surrounding her. These ‘sacred soul animals’ will be with you on your journey. The idea is that you can invoke or refer to these animals as ‘animal medicine’, they are creatures that can guide you/ help you on your way.
• Creativity Takes Courage – A great warm up session to get your creative mojo started by going over some warm up mixed media steps, both for the mind and for the hand.
• Your Quirky Amazing Life – I love making Quirky Birds (If you’re interested in signing up to the original Quirky Bird’s lesson, it’s now available as standalone here). They are super fun, relatively easy, get you in touch with your inner child and they bring smiles where ever they go! ;) For this lesson we use characteristics of people/ things we are grateful for and assign them to the quirky bird as a way to celebrate and honour them. Technique wise we work with a very basic wet-in-wet technique and I also include a PDF on ‘cultivating gratitude’.
• Roots & Ground, Wings & Light – Create a mixed media front facing portrait. We also reflect on the theme ‘honouring and grounding’, includes an optional meditation.
• Your Story Matters, The Ripple Effect – Using the fun technique of foam marbling and reflecting on getting in touch with the interconnectedness of us all and how each and everyone of us matters in this world. We symbolically represent this theme in the form of a drop of water falling into a larger body of water, making ripples.
• Dancing With Shadow – Focusing on working with our inner critic and our creative blocks and using Tam’s favourite ‘paint over collage’ art technique. Work with symbolism and transformation. ‘Paint over collage’ is a really interesting and different way to start a painting. It can really expand your understanding of shape & colour and lends itself well to go deeper. Includes optional meditation.
• Embracing All of You – Working with the concept of ’embracing all of ourselves’, including the sadder/ darker parts of ourselves. Includes a video and PDF on ‘self – forgiveness’. Create a ‘sitting’ girl using a ‘silhouetting’ technique, gelli-plating amd ‘masking’.
• Grow Free – Letting loose and become free-er by creating creative abstract flowers! It’s so fun and liberating creating in this way. Includes an optionalpersonal development exercise which works on transforming limiting beliefs into liberating beliefs.
• Expressive Florals – smaller bonus lesson from Life Book 2014 (a fun bonus lesson using paint to create big colourful messy expressionist flowers).
• Upside Down Inside Out – Experiment and play with expressive and unpredictable/ unstructured ways to create art. Using processes that will bring you in touch with your playful/ intuitive self. Creating blob art / ink stains/ paint with our non-dominant hand and creating with our eyes closed to then search for shapes and imagery in our art and bring these shapes forward. Expect fun, playful and expressive art.
• Build Your Dream & Affirmation Board – Smaller ‘bonus lesson’ where we reflect on the connectedness of us all and celebrate our vulnerability and authenticity as a way into deeper connection with our fellow humans. I show you how I like creating a dream/ affirmation board in the non-traditional (just-Tam) way.
• Zentangle Butterfly – smaller ‘bonus lesson’ where we create a zentangle butterfly on an inky background that flies towards everything you’re wanting to call in more and leaves behind it a ‘trail of what you want to let go of’.
• Other bonus lessons include: ‘art bites for beginners’ which explains basic supplies and how they are used and Basic colour theory.
• Binding your Life Book – learn how to bind your pages into a book!