Instructor: Patti Russotti
Monday - Tuesday
June 7 - 8
10am - 4pm
2 Sessions at Castle Hill’s Main Campus

What happens when we stop thinking of an image as finished?

What if we move it from analog to digital to analog—and round and round?

A photograph, painting, drawing, sketch, scribble, or found image can become the beginning of something entirely new. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll explore how image transfer, mark-making, and encaustic can work together to create a playful, layered, and unpredictable process.

Using inkAID film transfers, Transfierez, inkAID Receptive Coatings, mark-making, and wax, we’ll create multiple-layer experiments on a wide range of relatively flat surfaces.

Start with an image from a camera or phone, a scan, a drawing, a painting—or anything that can be digitized.

Make a film transfer.

Transfer it to a surface.

Add another transfer.

Make marks.

Add wax.

Scrape.

Reveal.

Obscure.

Add another layer.

And see what happens.

We’ll work with possibilities including paper, fabric, metal, brass, glass, wood, gold and silver leaf, Gampi, tissue paper, skins, and more.

The transfer can be the finished work—or simply the beginning.

There is no prescribed outcome. Instead, we’ll embrace experimentation, happy accidents, layering, and the unexpected. The goal is to create an environment where artists can let go of the need to know exactly where the work is going and instead let the work lead.

Your art needs play.

Play. Experiment. Take risks. Feel some joy. Discover the possibilities you didn’t know were possible.

There will be a pre-workshop Zoom meeting inviting participants to begin rethinking their relationship with finished, unfinished, accidental, controlled, and discovered. It’s an opportunity to open the door before the workshop begins.

BEGIN → RESPOND → DISCOVER

The real subject is permission to remain in the active creative process.

Patricia (Patti) Russotti is an artist, explorer, maker, and educator whose work investigates entropy, negentropy, nature, and the small things she encounters within the world around her. She is fascinated by the alchemical magic that occurs in natural phenomena—and in the creative process itself. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally through solo, group, and juried exhibitions and is held in private and corporate collections. Her practice encompasses analog, digital, alternative, and historic photographic processes, with a particular interest in moving images across processes and substrates. Russotti has taught and presented on Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom since their earliest versions and has been a regular presenter at national and international imaging and education conferences since the 1980s. Today, she offers workshops online and in person, helping artists expand their practices through digital tools, alternative processes, experimentation, and play. She is co-author of Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow Handbook (Focal Press, 2010) and is Professor Emerita of Rochester Institute of Technology, where she taught for four decades across the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), and the School of Print.