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This past weekend I took classes from two artists I admire a lot. On Friday I took “Journal Mapping” with Jill Berry.

Jill is a smart, fun, and passionate teacher. She LOVES maps and her enthusiasm for the subject rubbed off on all of us! The above “head map” is a map of my journey to Artfest (starting a few days before the event (chaotic scribbling at the back base of my head), and ending with the end of the first night at the event. (Sharpie, crayon on vellum)

Next we did a memory map. My map outlines (interpretatively) my walk to high school each day. My “aha” moment with this one was that I didn’t have to know exactly what the map was going to contain ahead of time… I could just START, and then add the memories as they came to me while working on the map. (Not sure this was such a hard concept for me to grasp, as it’s exactly how I teach my imaginary creatures, but….) My favorite technique of the day was using a stencil brush and dye inks, demonstrated in a video on Jill’s blog, here. (Sharpie, dye ink, colored pencil on paper)

The third map we did was of Fort Warden in Port Townsend, and you can see it here. I struggled a bit with what to do with this one, until I finally decided just to make it the monster-elephant that I kept seeing anyway. The little white boxes, or “teeth,” are actually the buildings that I ate, slept and taught in…

Next, a “constellation map”:

With this assignment we were asked to create an image and “map it” in the sky. A heart, an animal, a house… this should have been easy for me, right? But in the end my rebellious nature took over again, and I just made it a bunch of stars connected together:

I really like that Jill required us to title the map! (PanPastel, coffee, pencil, and sticker on watercolor paper)

Jill — THANK YOU — it was a great class!

(And if this seems fun to you, please check out Jill’s forthcoming book, Personal Geographies: Explorations in Mixed-Media Map-Making, due out November 2011. I even contributed a map to it!)

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Tomorrow I’ll show you the work from Lisa Engelbrecht’s class.