Weekend Update--Ranger U
omg, I'm soooo exhausted! I was at Ranger U all weekend. Basically, it's classes where teachers, designers, store owners learn techniques on how to use a particular product line of ours. It's always on a weekend and it starts Friday afternoon, goes through Saturday, and then Sunday till about noon. I participated in the one scheduled for this past weekend and I had so much fun! We featured our line of Perfect Pearls, one of my favorites among our products (in case I haven't mentioned it lately, I work for Ranger Industries and I love it!).
We started Friday afternoon with meet & greet, some snackies (oyyyy, the snacks), and started working right away. We did a few techniques and went till about 8:30 that night. Saturday morning, I went to Weight Watchers just to get weighed (down .8 lbs--yay); couldn't stay for the meeting although I really needed it. Absolutely SPEEDED down the Parkway to get to work and made it at just about 9 when we started again. Had some breakfast, playplayplay, lunch, playplayplay some more, break for dinner, but some of us went straight on through so that we could leave early (read: ME). Even though I finished early, I still left there about 8:30 that night. This morning, we did our presentations and "graduated", that is, we got our Ranger certification that we can teach these techniques. And I just realized late Saturday night that I will have been at Ranger straight through 10 days: this past week, all weekend, and next week; two days where I was there for almost 12 hours straight. No wonder I'm exhausted! Exhausted and with inky fingers!! Chuh! I'm going to take a nap right after I'm done!
ANYway, here is some of the stuff that I've done. I was going to scan them because it'll probably look better that way. But when I went to go scan them, the scanner didn't work, so I took pics instead. They look a little blurry, but it'll give you guys an idea of what we did in class.
Basic Perfect Pearling Technique: Dusting
Lifting
This pic shows the Lifting Technique better:
Northern Lights Technique (I love this!) (question to Commies: is this what the Northern Lights will look like when I come up that way to see them before I die?)
Luster Paste Paper. Artists use this thick paste that they apply to the surface so they can run a comb over it to create a textured pattern.
Textured Rust Finish: this is supposed to look antiquey, like a rusted old piece of hardware
Cosmos Technique: this is one of my favorite techniques with this stuff, quite possibly my favorite (notice my sample is also in my favorite color--heh). The pic is super de duper blurry and the glare on it is horrible; one of the reasons why I wanted to see if the scan would show it better. Sigh. It will have to do for now. Trust me when I say that it looks way cooler in person.
Watercolor Pencils with Perfect Pearls
Water Webbing
And last but not least, this is probably the most impressive of all of these techniques.
Faux Hammered Metal Technique: all of these are made with paper. Yes, PAPER. Cool, ain't it?
And now I am taking my nap! :)
EDIT - Update 9/25/06:
Finally scanned the Perfect Pearls stuff. And funnily enough, they didn't look better than the pictures I took. The shininess and the luminescent quality of the Perfect Pearls doesn't exactly come through in a scan. Buuuut since I scanned them already, I thought I'd post them. I won't do a side by side comparison, but I'll just tack them on here.
Dusting and lifting
Cosmos technique
Luster paste paper
Northern Lights--see what I mean by not as cool looking? It looks like some sort of relief map. And seriously, these don't look half as cool as they do in real life.
Textured Rust
Embossing powder and Perfect Pearls combination
Painting an embossed image with Perfect Pearls paint
Watercolors with Perfect Pearls (in this case, the picture, while not as clear as the scan, definitely looks better)
We started Friday afternoon with meet & greet, some snackies (oyyyy, the snacks), and started working right away. We did a few techniques and went till about 8:30 that night. Saturday morning, I went to Weight Watchers just to get weighed (down .8 lbs--yay); couldn't stay for the meeting although I really needed it. Absolutely SPEEDED down the Parkway to get to work and made it at just about 9 when we started again. Had some breakfast, playplayplay, lunch, playplayplay some more, break for dinner, but some of us went straight on through so that we could leave early (read: ME). Even though I finished early, I still left there about 8:30 that night. This morning, we did our presentations and "graduated", that is, we got our Ranger certification that we can teach these techniques. And I just realized late Saturday night that I will have been at Ranger straight through 10 days: this past week, all weekend, and next week; two days where I was there for almost 12 hours straight. No wonder I'm exhausted! Exhausted and with inky fingers!! Chuh! I'm going to take a nap right after I'm done!
ANYway, here is some of the stuff that I've done. I was going to scan them because it'll probably look better that way. But when I went to go scan them, the scanner didn't work, so I took pics instead. They look a little blurry, but it'll give you guys an idea of what we did in class.
Basic Perfect Pearling Technique: Dusting
Lifting
This pic shows the Lifting Technique better:
Northern Lights Technique (I love this!) (question to Commies: is this what the Northern Lights will look like when I come up that way to see them before I die?)
Luster Paste Paper. Artists use this thick paste that they apply to the surface so they can run a comb over it to create a textured pattern.
Textured Rust Finish: this is supposed to look antiquey, like a rusted old piece of hardware
Cosmos Technique: this is one of my favorite techniques with this stuff, quite possibly my favorite (notice my sample is also in my favorite color--heh). The pic is super de duper blurry and the glare on it is horrible; one of the reasons why I wanted to see if the scan would show it better. Sigh. It will have to do for now. Trust me when I say that it looks way cooler in person.
Watercolor Pencils with Perfect Pearls
Water Webbing
And last but not least, this is probably the most impressive of all of these techniques.
Faux Hammered Metal Technique: all of these are made with paper. Yes, PAPER. Cool, ain't it?
And now I am taking my nap! :)
EDIT - Update 9/25/06:
Finally scanned the Perfect Pearls stuff. And funnily enough, they didn't look better than the pictures I took. The shininess and the luminescent quality of the Perfect Pearls doesn't exactly come through in a scan. Buuuut since I scanned them already, I thought I'd post them. I won't do a side by side comparison, but I'll just tack them on here.
Dusting and lifting
Cosmos technique
Luster paste paper
Northern Lights--see what I mean by not as cool looking? It looks like some sort of relief map. And seriously, these don't look half as cool as they do in real life.
Textured Rust
Embossing powder and Perfect Pearls combination
Painting an embossed image with Perfect Pearls paint
Watercolors with Perfect Pearls (in this case, the picture, while not as clear as the scan, definitely looks better)