Our new team has faces you'll recognize and six new ones. These artists and creators are spread around the globe, hailing from the USA, Australia, India, and Austria.
We are delighted to introduce the 2019-20 StencilGirl® Creative Team (from top row right), Linda Edkins Wyatt, Jennifer Gallagher, Heidi Smith, Sue Plumb, Peg Robinson & Shel C, (from bottom row left) Claudia Neubacher, Sunila & Aditi Mahajon, and Jill McDowell.
We invite you to get to know them now and over the coming year:
Heidi Smith is a mixed media
painter who enjoys creating work that incorporates texture and touches that are
unexpected. She has been artistic since childhood, although it has taken many
years for her to feel comfortable sharing her artwork with others. For Heidi,
art is a way to escape as well as to open up. She enjoys everything from art
journaling to oil painting and is fond of subjects that symbolize friendship,
family, and emotion.
Heidi served in the Air Force for seven years and later studied Fine Art with a
concentration in painting. Originally from Upstate NY, she now lives in
Leesburg, Virginia just outside of Washington, DC with her fiancé Phil, cat
LuLu, and Goose the dog.
Jennifer Gallagher is an
artist and art instructor currently living in West Virginia with her husband
and two sons. She has been involved in the arts her entire life in one way or
another. After studying fashion in college, Jennifer found herself drawn to new
art forms and techniques. She now enjoys painting, collage, art journaling, and
mixed media. Geometric shapes and patterns are her greatest source of
inspiration and joy.
Linda Edkins Wyatt, a mixed
media artist living in the heart of New York City, has been making art since
childhood. Whenever she was bored, her mother or older sisters would teach her
a new skill such as mending, hand and machine stitching, embroidery, crochet,
needlepoint or knitting. Her first creative memory was making a doll dress
fashioned from an old white sock and trimmed with thick turquoise yarn.
Linda started her
professional art career as a textile designer and print stylist, and later
transitioned to layout and graphic design. She enjoys using bits of paper,
original fabric scraps, and recycled materials in her journals, collages and
paper dolls, and loves creating digital designs, collages, and patterns in
Photoshop.
By day, Linda works for NYC
Health + Hospitals. Evenings, weekends and holidays she spends painting,
journaling, sewing or making unique paper dolls. She also teaches monthly mixed
media classes at The Ink Pad NYC in Greenwich Village.
Linda has had artwork and
articles published in the books Mixed Media Self Portraits, 1000 Artist Journal
Pages, and Quilts and Health. Her mixed media work and art quilts have appeared
in the magazines Cloth Paper Scissors, Quilting Arts, and Scott Publications’
Just Mixed Media, Just Swap Art, and Just Steampunk.
Linda's artwork:
Facebook
Instagram
Pinterest
Blog
Sue Plumb comes from the beautiful Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland, Australia where she lives with my hubby Shannon; their three kids - daughter Brielle aged 11, and twin sons Hunter and Kaden aged 6; and our cat, Genghis.
Sue began scrapbooking approximately 10 years ago, shortly after the birth of her daughter. Since that time, her work has evolved from a very simplistic paper-based style, to where it is now - far more artistic and often incorporates bright color, mixed media, and eclectic elements. Besides scrapbook pages, she also enjoys creating artworks on canvas; art journal and traveler's notebooks spreads, and sometimes off the page items and cards. Put simply, Sue just loves to create!
She is currently on several design teams including Australian manufacturers Cocoa Vanilla Studio and Colour Blast; and US manufacturer Viva Las VegaStamps. I am also a design team member for the Scrap the Girls challenge blog.
She says, "I am a huge fan of StencilGirl® designs and am thrilled to be joining the team. I am SO looking forward to creating and sharing with you this coming year!"
We think it is super that we have teams within teams. Shel C and Peg Robinson are friends who live across the country from one another yet sometimes make art together. Sunila and Aditi are a mother and daughter working together as Dots2Lines.
Shel C and Peg Robinson
Shel C is a self-taught mixed media
artist with a love of all things paper.
The focus of her paper obsession
shows itself in lots of collage artwork as well as art journaling, card making,
bookmaking, and the occasional dimensional art piece.
She is inspired by the shapes and colors surrounding her in the beautiful
Sonoran Desert of Arizona. She also is inspired by the many nature scapes
she has seen and photographed while traveling.
When not in the studio gluing paper to stuff, Shel spends her time caring for a
multigenerational family of six.
Peg Robinson has pursued
multiple creative avenues for many years. She makes things from stuff others
throw away and enjoys collage, assemblage, and journaling along with other arts
and crafts. Her friends labeled her the craft encyclopedia because when they
need to know something about arts/crafts and supplies, they ask her
first.
After retiring from full-time
employment Peg has focused on creative pursuits for about five years and
settled into an artistic life. As a Helping Hand Artist with DecoArt, she finds
great satisfaction in helping others find their own artistic voice. I find art
is a true healer and can easily share the spirit of joy that comes from
creating.
Mother-Daughter team, Sunila
Mahajan and Aditi Mahajan are entrepreneurs. As part of Dots to Line, their
home decor business, they handcraft home-decor products using techniques
of mixed media and decoupage.
Sunia and Aditi are into paper-crafting, layouts, journaling, album making and
scrapbooking. Their style of arts and crafts is a fusion of techniques and use
of vibrant colors as they keep learning and try to incorporate variety into
their creation.
They aim to spread joy. Documenting memories, especially through scrapbooking,
album making. and paper crafting makes them happy.
Sunila & Aditi's artwork:
Jill McDowell is a college
administrator whose creativity was reawakened in 2015.
Since then she’s
developed a passion for learning, exploring different art genres, experimenting
with new techniques, and transforming what she’s learned into her own
style. Most evenings and weekends you’ll find her stowed away in her
studio creating mixed media projects and playing in her art journal.
Jill
lives in Connecticut with her husband, Jim, and their two lovable mutts,
Tobiwan Kenobi and Penny Lane.
Jill's artwork:
Claudia Neubacher lives in Vienna, Austria with her husband, their son, and their much-loved dog girlie, Bluna. She was an art teacher before she became a stay at home mom. Now, she happily paints and crafts away in her studio.
Claudia has been creating ever since she could first hold a pencil. "Plumps" were the first creatures that filled her drawing sheets and gave me that wonderful feeling of being an almighty "creator."
She says, "They were nothing more than clumsily drawn circles with added strokes all around that resembled their legs, but to me, they were the first creations that I had breathed life into. And that made me proud and very happy. I still have moments when I feel like that today...they are more seldom, of course...and therefore even more precious to me. Isn't this what being creative really is all about?"
Claudia's artwork:
We are happy and lucky these wonderful artists are part of the StencilGirl Team and thanks to YOU for loving stencils like we love stencils! It's going to be a fabulous year!
