REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK:Art Escapes: Taking it one tile at a time

“Just smooth the grout out around the tile,” Michele Taylor instructed.

I stared at the bucket of gray goo, then gingerly poked at it. I then realized with horror that it stuck to my finger.

I was spending that Monday in the second of my two Art Escapes classes with Taylor, who was explaining how to make glazed tile art.

I’m not an artist by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the only thing I’ve applied a brush to since high school has been, well, a toilet bowl. But I wanted to try creating something out of nothing, preferably in a non-scary, short-term environment that didn’t charge an arm and a leg.

Laguna Outreach for Community Arts (LOCA) offers all three in their Art Escapes classes, which they offer at a reasonable cost — $35 — in keeping with their mission to provide art education to everyone.

The classes cover a variety of topics, including painting, mixed media and papermaking. Similar off-season programs include ceramic and sculpting workshops at the Festival of Arts and the Sawdust Art Festival’s Spring Into Art workshops.

LOCA, a collaborative effort by artists and educators, is funded by city grants and a variety of local organizations, offers Art and Sea Adventures Girlfriends Getaways (art classes in conjunction with the Laguna Beach Visitors & Conference Bureau) and the Art Escapes classes.

Before my first Art Escape, Taylor said to come in with an idea of what I wanted to capture on tile. So, being a perfectionist, I spent Sunday night in a tizzy, pulling pictures off the Internet and going through coffee-table books. I finally went with a Mucha Art Nouveau design. “True artists” might laugh at my choice, to hear them talk. Let me explain.

In my art education, I haven’t really matured past a first love of Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau. But many artists say that one must develop a capacity to grasp more “complex” art.

The languid fairy-tale women of Waterhouse and Rossetti are, therefore, the artistic equivalent of boxed rosé, whereas a hot new abstract artist would be considered a limited-production Riesling from a tiny family-owned winery on Spring Mountain in Napa, where one risks their life on the windy, one-lane drive, hoping to score one of the 300 cases that were produced that year.

But I stuck to my guns because, well, my Mucha was pretty.

I stepped into the class the next morning with apprehension, but was happy to find a small group setting on the grounds of the Aliso Creek Inn, a hidden gem in a canyon off Coast Highway.

We used a wax resist process, similar to the children’s craft in which watercolor is applied to crayoned line art. The crayon repels the paint, which settles into pockets of pigment. In the “grown-up” version, after painting a design using the wax resist, we filled in the gaps using colorful glazes. The finished relief tiles were then fired by Taylor.

She was a very positive teacher, complimenting people’s creations and offering gently guided suggestions for improvement.

She warned us at the end of the first class that the colors we chose would be changed in the firing. .

“It’s like Christmas morning when you open up your kiln; you never know what you’re going to get,” Taylor told us. “If crazy things happen, so be it. I love that.”

Fortunately, my colors weren’t too altered; others weren’t so happy with theirs.

Color mishaps aside, my classmates were quite an inspired bunch. They ranged from those who, like me, didn’t know the avant-garde from a Christmas card, to true professional artists looking to expand their abilities.

Classmate Mollie Bing, who heads up the Sawdust’s Spring Into Art program, took a flower design provided by Taylor and added numerals, making beautiful yet functional street address signs.

Textile artist Reem Khalil, a Sawdust exhibitor, chose to experiment with the glazes, breaking the “rule” of putting one color in each section. She created vivid flame-like flowers and lush water, hued in blues and greens.

Then we were on to the second and final session, where all I had to do was inlay the tile in grout and make a mosaic edge around it. Summoning up my courage, I plunged the handle of a silvery fork into the grout. It lurched this way and that, sticking where it shouldn’t and not staying where it should.

I got it under my nails and in my hair; much of it ended up on the table, rather than nicely bordering my tile. Luckily Taylor came by and, with a reassuring smile, took the fork of torment from me. She swirled the grout around my tile, expertly edging it, then used a sponge to create a pleasing texture on the newly formed border.

After staring in disbelief, I began laying out my mosaic, adding shells, copper letters and other found objects that I brought from home.

I chose to spell out “D-R-E-A-M,” having achieved one of mine.

For more information on LOCA and its programs, call (949) 363-4700 or visit www.locaarts.org.