Darlene Armstrong
www.gallery386.com
Darlene Armstrong has been a working metalsmith for 24 years and is self taught with most of her informal training coming out of Adult Education Beginning and Intermediate Jewelry classes in 1988 and 1989 as well as a semester of Casting and other metals skills at Front Range Community College, Denver, Colorado in 1998. Previous to her metals classes, she made and sold wide variety of beadwork for 7 years.
She worked as a production jeweler for Madison Designs in Lafayette, Colorado from 1998 to 1999, where she created prototypes, samples and orders for The Sundance Catalog and Peruvian Imports catalog. During this time she also worked in her own shop 30-40 hours a week creating jewelry to sell to galleries. She has shown in Galleries in New Mexico, Oregon, 12 places in Colorado, North Carolina and Arkansas.
In 1999, she completed a Metal Weaving workshop at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, St. Louis, Mo.
In 2000, she earned her Senior Level Precious Metal Clay certification in Ft. Myers, Florida from Mary Ann Devos. She began teaching PMC the next year, after spending months experimenting with the product. Darlene uses PMC in her metalsmithing pieces, usually as a focal point and now (2011) teaches 6 different PMC classes: PMC Beginning, PMC Advanced, PMC Rings, PMC Beads, PMC Stonesetting, PMC Enameling, and Copper Clay. During the time spent in Ft. Myers, Darlene took Dichroic Glass training and has been actively experimenting and teaching glass slumping for 12 years. She has had personal instruction in goldsmithing, lapidary, etching glass and metal, enameling and kumboo.
Darlene teaches 20+ different workshops as well as Metalsmithing I, II, & III at The Denver School of Metal Arts. Darlene has conservatively 31,000 hours of metalsmithing and 1200 hours of teaching both privately and in a school setting. She has been featured multiple times in Art Jewelry & Jewelry Artist magazine's as well as Glass Artist magazine.
Darlene Armstrong and Travis Ogden (husband and wife team) co-own the Denver School of Metal Arts. Travis owns the Naja Tool & Supply, a jewelry supply store next door to the school.
Darlene has her own jewelry business called Armstrong Jewelry and her jewelry can be seen on her personal website:
www.gallery386.com
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