This Columbus Day weekend, I spent my break at the Art Educators of New Jersey (AENJ) conference in Long Branch, New Jersey. Each year the conference has a specific theme, and this year's was "Story and Art." Seeing as I'm an English major hoping to write the next great American novel, I had no complaints about tagging along with my mom (she's the art teacher in the family) and maybe attending a workshop or two that focused more on the story aspect of things. Plus, I could spend any downtime doing my homework with an amazing view of the ocean. Things, more or less, went according to my mental plan. Here's a quick recap of my experiences during the three-day conference.

Day One - Sunday

This was the day I arrived at the conference, and it was the day I got the most downtime. So, I spent most of my day perusing the vendor room and getting some free art supply samples (it was basically ComicCon for art people). I also met with a few college representatives there about their graduate programs. In case anyone's curious, Rowan Universty had a Creative Writing graduate program and is currently looking like the winner here. A few people mistook me for an actual art teacher and started asking me things like, "So what grades do you teach?" and "Do you think you'll actually do this project with your students?" After I explained to them only about five times that I'm an aspiring writer and not an art teacher did they stop asking me those questions.

Day Two - Monday

Once again, I went back to the vendor room for some more free samples, as well as to see the tables I had missed the day before. I entered a few raffles for free pencils and paintbrushes, but I was unfortunately not the winner there. My only conference was in the evening, and its description was basket weaving. Essentially, the project required me to cut some paper into strips, weave them, fold the finished weaving to look like a basket, and then glue it to a background of green paper. Then I had to make flowers to put "in" the basket; long story short, my completed project (shown below) proved to me I'm not so great at paper crafts:

Day Three - Tuesday

The last day of the conference actually ended up being my favorite. I had an 8AM workshop called Personal Botanical. The point of the workshop was to sketch out a flower that symbolized myself, and then draw it on a dictionary page. Apparently the dictionary page was supposed to have a word that embodied both myself and the flower; I just chose a page at random and got to work. As the workshop came to a close, a few of the other attendees came up to me and asked if they could take a photo of my work to show their classes as an example. Needless to say, that was a pretty big confidence boost. In case anyone's curious, here's was my personal botanical looks like:

At 5PM, I had another workshop focused on writing and illustrating my own children's story. While I was initially excited to go because it was finally a workshop that involved writing, I was quickly disappointed. It was such a simple project, and it really didn't need the 90-minute time slot it had been given. Honestly, a three year old could have done this no problem; all I had to do to "make" the book was fold a long piece of paper into for sections. Unfortunately, my bitterness about the activity shown in my work as I incorporated a bit of my snarky attitude into the story up until I realized I only had one spot left to make a happy ending:

All in all, it was a fun trip and I can't wait until next year's conference! However, next time I'll probably read up on workshops before I sign up for them.