I went to the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, CA on Friday. It is so inspiring to walk around all the art galleries and showcases.

Of course, the highlight of the evening was the Pageant of the Masters where they take paintings and sculptures and blow them up to life-sized works of art and use real people in place of the main subjects! How cool is that? If you are ever in the area from July through August, I highly, highly recommend getting tickets for this event. It’s something you’ll always remember. You have to get your tickets in December, though, if you want to have any hope of getting good seats.

In the main Festival of Arts area there was a printmaking demonstration going on when I was there. A young artist, Lindsay Buchman, was demonstrating her craft. She set up an inexpensive way for the ticket-holders to try out printmaking for themselves with a thin little Styrofoam square and some pencils. We “etched” our designs in the Styrofoam and then Lindsay inked the squares and placed them on one of her small presses for us to print.

It may be a small press, but Lindsay says it could cost about $3,000 brand new (Dick Blick has them starting at $366 plus materials, obviously these are not the high caliber machines that Lindsay uses). I bet you could even make a very make-shift one with a rolling pin, provided you could get the pressure right. It would be a fun art project for kids!

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you some of the works of the artists from the galleries! I wish that you could see these prints and sculptures with your own eyes; the photos simply can’t compare with witnessing the colors, textures and details first hand.

Lindsay Buchman

Lindsay Buchman is the aforementioned printmaker. She also has a jewelry section on her website. I really liked an Asian-style print that she had on display, but I couldn’t find a picture of it in her online portfolio and we weren’t allowed to take photos of the artists’ work. She already has an impressive portfolio, even though she is still a student. MoMA has a pretty cool little mini-site called What is a Print? talking about several different types of printmaking.

Vinita Voogd

Next to the printmaking demo was an artist named Vinita Voogd, another printmaker. Her work was so detailed and filled with textures of all sorts. I particularly liked her collagraph work (make sure to visit all three pages!). On her website she explains the technique:

a collage of tactile and relief textures on a back plate which when inked and printed will exaggerate the relief and transmit it to paper creating a rich and varied surface.

Fred Stodder

I was absolutely enamored by the colors Fred Stodder uses in his sculptures, teapots and vases . They are so vibrant! The perfect gradients make these pieces look almost other-worldly when you see them in real life (pictures just can’t do them justice!).

Agnes Copeland

Agnes Copeland had some awesome collage work done with all sorts of paper made of different materials and many varying hues. I could’ve looked at them for hours! Too bad there are no close-up detail shots of these works.

Carolyn Machado

Carolyn Machado had some pretty neat sculptures and ceramic mosaics. She used unusual materials and often put them together in juxtaposing compositions. She had quite a few “mixed media assemblages” as she calls them, on display that had chopsticks and circuit boards (no photos of these particular ones on her website unfortunately). I liked these because they were so unique, and I’m a sucker for Asian art.

John Taylor

John Taylor’s work is amazing. He basically takes found objects (read junk) and driftwood and turns them into art. He painstakingly recreates historically accurate ships, “forgotten vessels of America’s maritime fleet,” as he so eloquently puts it. One of the ships on display, the Cairo (I couldn’t get the slideshow to work, maybe you’ll have better luck), used such varied materials as bullet casings, credit cards and circuit boards! The other sculptures on display at the Festival of Arts was the Indianapolis and Whale Broken Net. View more of his sculptures on his website.

I highly recommend visiting the Festival of Arts and many of the other galleries in Laguna Beach (Sawdust Festival and Art-A-Fair, which is also home to Tivoli Too! where I was married).