Into the Woods

This weekend I went to the Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat for the Seattle AIGA Into the Woods design conference. It was amazing! There are a lot of pictures to follow and if you just want to look at pictures and not read text, that's great, but if you're Josh McKinney and want to see your doppelganger, pay attention!

We got there on Friday around 11am. Just in time for registration and lunch. Dave just couldn't let go of work and we had to take his blackberry away from him. Here he is talking to Nani.


This is who I went with, Terry and Dave.


Here I am at the start of the conference.


This is our cabin and the water fountain in front of it. They were nice cabins, they had towel warmers. I've never seen a towel warmer in a room before, or anywhere for that matter. All the soaps smelled really good too. Plus, the water pressure in the shower was excellent. Terry and I had the room all to ourselves. It was luxurious.


That day we broke off into workshops. My first workshop was with a guy named Rama Hughes. His workshop was titled, How to Tame an Angry Portrait. He showed us some of his work and gave us some tips and then had us draw each other. It was so much fun. By far my most favorite workshop. It reminded me how much I love to draw people.

Then, Terry and I went to a workshop taught by his wife, Christine. She was really nice. I had a crush on the Hughes family. Her class was called, Cut and Paste. She told us a little bit about collaging and then let us create. Here is Terry doing her creation. Terry is a very temperamental artist.


This is mine. Mine is an homage to Marsha. I've never done any collage before and all I could think of doing is copying Marsha. Imitation is the highest form of flattery.


Sunflowers.


Some river.


There were all these giant salmon sculptures everywhere designed by local artists.


Terry and Dave.


Me and a Salmon smelling the flowers.


The mountain in the distance is why the resort is called the Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat. You can see the profile of her head, then her large boobs and then it tapers down to her body, sort of how there's supposed to be a profile in Mt. Timpanogos, but I've never seen it. This one is pretty clear.


Me and the fish totally made out.


After the workshops and the dinner, we went to a lecture by Angela Adams. At first, she was really quiet and I was worried that it was going to be really boring, but she made it work. She spoke about her hometown in Maine and her family and how she gets her inspiration from those things. It made me appreciate the tiny details in my life, and circles.


The next morning we heard a lecture from Jay Ryan. I have been a fan of his for a little while now and was so excited to hear his lecture. I thought his was the most entertaining of all of them. The rest of the people were really monotone and scared to show their personalities. He was pretty funny.


One of my most favorite things about the whole conference was the abundance of excellent food. Every meal there were 3 salads to choose from, 2 entrees and 4 desserts. I was more excited to eat than anything else.


The next day I took a metals class from Sally Brock who owns the Fancy store in downtown Seattle. I made a ring that says Fergie on it, only I picked an upside down a instead of a g for my lettering and the word isn't right, so I got sort of depressed about that.

Then I went swimming in their heated outdoor pool. I want one of those. Dave joined me.

Then Dave and I took a class on letterpress taught by Amy Redmond. She was really personable. I would like to take some classes from her here at SVC. Here is Dave making a giant 0.




I did a paparazzi photo of Jay Ryan.


The whole conference I kept having classes with this guy who looked just like Josh McKinney. It was uncanny. Same skin color, same lips and nose. Can you guess which one is Josh?


A quail!


I never got to the gym to work on my fitness but I did make a shirt in the letterpress class that said fergalicious on it. I really maxed out the Fergie stuff this weekend.


That evening a design group from the Netherlands called Lust spoke to us. They showed us these projects that they worked on that I needed a Urim and Thummim to understand. They were way beyond me. Some of their projects included a machine that worked the same way the touch computer that Tom Cruise used in the Minority Report worked where you could touch the screen and drag stuff everywhere. It made me a little depressed. I never knew such things really existed.


This was one of my favorite people I met at the conference, a guy named Aaron. The first morning I met him, he mentioned that he thought the giant Chihuly sculpture looked like a wicked old lady's muff. Instantly he made the number one spot on my list of awesome. He was sort of the doppelganger of Kirk Faulkner.


We got back into the car and I bought some comfort food and made it back to Seattle on Sunday. Thanks Dave for driving us there!