- Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan, and welcome to "ARTEFFECTS."

When Carol J. Neel and Penny Pemberton met decades ago, they found they had a lot in common.

One of those commonalities was a love of creating art.

In that moment, a beautiful relationship was formed.

They decided to adventure together and learn different art forms, lead workshops, and share a life of nature and creativity.

(bright music) - After retiring from nursing, Penny and I decided to pursue watercolors.

We both have an insatiable appetite to learn.

- From watercolor, we went into glass.

Glass fusion, stained glass, mosaics.

And then we went into printmaking, I believe.

(bright music) And we've done repose, we've done polymer clay bookmaking, of course.

And our next adventure is gonna be in bead making.

Every time we take one workshop or we do one project, it leaps into a, "What if?"

And, "Why not?"

And, "I wonder."

We bounce it off of each other and we get so many different ideas.

- To just stick with one medium would be suppressing that little voice that wants to jump out and explore and be playful.

The biggest part of our relationship is the playfulness that we have together because if I get an idea and I tell Penny, she'll say, "Yes, and then we can do this and this and this."

And then we'll say, "Well, how can we learn to do that?"

And then we start a whole exploration.

It's like we have our own university here.

(laughs) (bright music) - [Penny] Everything that we do leads to something else that's exciting.

(playful music) - I did an abstract acrylic art painting.

As I was looking at it, that little question creeps in.

What if I could take this painting and make a multi-block print out of it?

So today, I am going to be working on one of the blocks that required learning yet another new technique, which is lino block etching.

We did multiple experiments to learn how to get the lino to print in a very diffuse way that's not cutting.

(playful music) I like the idea that I could repeat it, that I could play with different colors if I wanted to as I did with the Goose Lake print.

The original key block was going to be black over color.

And actually, I have to give credit to Penny because red is her favorite color.

And she said, "What if you print the key block in red?

How would that look?"

So I said, "Well, let's try it."

When I changed the key block to red, it just kind of, it erupted.

It just, our eyes just said, "Oh, that red's gotta stay.

Forget the black."

And that's one of the differences in printmaking, you can play around more than you can with watercolor.

(playful music) - We approach a project a little bit differently from one another, but it always ends up the same.

For example, if I'm making a book, most people will put the glue on the book with a brush very precisely.

I put a glove in the middle and I rub it on with my fingers.

My fingers are my best friend.

That's how I do it.

To make a book, you buy book board, it takes three sheets to make eight signatures, and a signature is a folded, like a portfolio of three pieces.

Then I glue down the cover paper, I make the edges, and I do that by coming in like this and pushing it.

That'll make one edge.

After that, you start binding.

This one, I've started particularly has bead work.

I punch the holes in here to match the holes that I make in the cover, and I start to bind.

And that's how the binding ends up.

Then I decorate.

(playful music) From there, we start journaling.

We start sketching.

- Wherever we go, we take our journals and we document what we're doing, the date, where we are, and we always do some kind of a sketch.

- [Penny] That's where all of our favorite memories are stored.

Journaling has become a really important part of our lives.

(playful music) (bright music) - How the combining of the artwork happens.

We were invited to go take a book making workshop, which we did.

But it just so happens at the same time, we had finished doing some reduction lino prints, and we had also just finished fusing some glass beads.

So I said to Penny, "Why don't we take our prints and use the art prints as the decorative cover rather than store-bought decorative paper?

- So then you say, "Well, how can I incorporate my glass into this?"

So we started making books with inserts of our glass fusion projects.

That became exciting.

- We took the glass beads that we made and we incorporated them into the binding.

So it starts off, we're gonna learn to make a book, but we can cover it with our prints and we can decorate the spine with our beads that we made.

- Then we embarked on doing a series of paintings in watercolor and then doing the very same painting in printmaking.

- [Carol] And so everything just kind of ends up fusing together into one final project.

- It becomes an adventure that we share, and we bring our own personalities to it and our own thoughts and ideas.

And nine times out of 10, our thoughts will be in synchronicity.

I much prefer creating art with Carol because it's always a very loving, exciting relationship.

- The end product becomes both of us.

It's very gratifying to work on it together.

(light music) - [Narrator] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

(bright music) In memory of Sue McDowell.

(bright music) The Carol Franc Buck Foundation.

(bright music) And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

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