Michael Shemchuk | Power of 12: Abstraction by Design

Workshop: Power of 12: Abstraction by Design

Instructor: Michael Shemchuk

Dates: October 1-4, 2026

Days: 4

Time: 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Level: All

Class Size: 12

Tuition: $1095

Supplies: Some included

Create a cohesive body of work across twelve 12”x12” panels in this fast-paced, mixed media workshop. Designed for artists ready to push both quality and quantity. This workshop activates your creative flow through structured repetition, intuitive response, and decisive editing. Power of 12 takes you into high-production mode—where design, composition, and creative decision-making happen in real time. 

You’ll move through pivotal AbD processes: layering paint and paper, scraping, sanding, wetting, gluing, peeling, and sealing—cycling through these actions to build surface depth and compositional clarity. 

Production Line

This workshop transforms your creative energy into momentum. You’ll move swiftly through multiple stages of development, treating your panels as a unified series while allowing space for variation and surprise. Each artist determines the orientation, sequencing, and visual relationships between the panels—establishing rhythm, contrast, and cohesion.This format of 12 panels offers a dynamic opportunity to explore multiple configurations—rows (6 over 6), stacked (3 over 4), vertical columns, diptychs, triptychs, or a full linear installation. 

The result is a flexible body of work that can be installed in numerous ways.

AbD Method (Abstraction by Design)

Abstraction by Design (AbD) is a mixed media method rooted in the layered interplay of paper and paint applied directly to panel surfaces. Through simultaneous application, artists create a foundation that invites sanding, scraping, saturating, peeling, collaging, and repainting—often in repeated cycles. This tactile process encourages experimentation and embraces unpredictability. Wet and dry techniques are often used side-by-side, allowing for dynamic, textured surfaces to emerge organically. 

A R R: Action. Review. React.

The A R R practice is the process of responding thoughtfully to both the deliberate and incidental actions in our work. This requires taking time to observe your work, measure your response to both the controlled(deliberate) or spontaneous (incidents ) in the work, this includes both adding or removing elements.