Visitors to island art galleries and studios reach visual overload quickly. Colors ricochet from weavings, paintings, carvings, ceramics and jewelry. Reflections bounce from vases’ sleek finishes. A pottery tea service’s matte glaze gathers light in its curves.

While art inherently attracts viewers’ eyes, another level of art exists in darkness.

By closing their eyes, people can explore how art appeals to other senses. Scents of dense oil paints fill studios. Warm aromas hang in woodworkers’ haunts accented with the tang of metal blades. Dryness wafts from weavers’ basket withes and ranks of wool. Heat from kilns and fires for glass artists bake the air in other studios. By absorbing the smells of art, people learn about the artist and what surrounds that person as they work.

This weekend, art connoisseurs and the simply curious can meet island artists during the Open Studio Tour. From Clinton to Oak Harbor, 70 artists will discuss and demonstrate their work Saturday and Sunday.

It’s an excellent way to feel the island’s artistic pulse. While Bayview Cash Store on South Whidbey will exhibit works from every participating artist so people can plan their tours, North Whidbey artists will be well represented during the tour.

“I can’t come to my studio and not work,” oil painter Judy Mello said. One day last week, she’d meant to spend time straightening her Coupeville studio for the tour.

“Instead, I found myself with a pallet knife in my hand, painting,” she said.

In Mello’s studio, canvasses thick with paint lean against each other and hang between wooden studs. Ripples of ridged paint become landscapes rich with flowers, grasses and movement.

Aromas swirl around the tiny studio competing with sights. A faint scent of turpentine veils oil paint’s heady aroma. Lush aromas of fir, grass and flowers drift in the studio’s door from Mello’s husband John’s garden.

Such natural scents suit Mello’s studio filled with “plein air” art. But her style of painting outside is anything but plain. “I paint an interpretation of what I see,” Mello said.

She paints outdoors at least once a week year round. Only pouring rain keeps her and her painting buddy indoors. Mello said working outdoors is critical to her art.

“I see things differently when I’m outside and when I’m in my studio.”

Gordon Grant’s Oak Harbor studio is about the same size as Mello’s, but its contents share no resemblance to the painters’ work. Incense from aromatic cedar shavings scent the room. Other woods lend their fragrance. Intense colors and textures capture attention. And that’s just from Grant’s handmade tools.

Grant makes traditional bentwood tools that Native Pacific Northwest carvers used. He fashions blades from old plows.

“It’s beautiful steel sitting in fields, going to rust,” Grant said. He asks landowners for the metal and said practically everyone gives him their unused farm equipment.

Grant crafts everything from ceremonial masks and rattles, bowls, intricate boxes and totem poles. He also carves elaborate speaking sticks.

“When groups of people told stories or discussed anything, whoever held the stick had the right to speak and everyone listened,” Grant said.

He weaves traditional symbols in his carvings. Bear faces, raven heads, orca fins, fish and frogs incise yew as well as red and yellow cedar.

Grant said that to Native Americans, each wood carries certain properties.

“Look at this,” he said, tilting a box panel carved with a bear face. At every angle the yew wood’s hue changed: bright light yellow to orange to deep umber.

Native Americans used carved items daily for utilitarian purposes and religious ceremonies. Grant means for his carvings to be held often as Native American woodwork was.

“Native American carvings participated in life,” he added.

“You have to touch and hold the wood,” Grant said, turning a burnished yellow tobacco bowl in his hands. “How an object wears with a person’s touch shows … as much a part of art as the skill of the carver.”

During the Sept. 25 and 26 Open Studio tour, enthusiasts can learn the skills of painters, collage makers, photographers, carvers. jewelers, potters, weavers and ceramicists.

No matter what studios people visit, they should take a moment to feel every facet of the environment, from texture to color, and of course, inhale the aromas surrounding art — the scent of creation.

Take the tour

More than 70 artists will showcase their works at 68 different locations during the 8th annual Open Studio Tour, Sept. 25 and 26 on Whidbey Island. Studios will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 to 4 Sunday. Tour headquarters is in the newly-restored historic Bayview Cash Store at Bayview and Marsh View roads, seven miles north of the Clinton ferry dock and 48 miles from Deception Pass. Examples of each artist’s work will be displayed upstairs at the Cash Store to assist in planning tour itineraries. The exhibit will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 9 to 3 Sunday.

Sponsored by the Island Arts Council, the Studio Tour offers a rare opportunity for arts patrons to meet some of Whidbey’s most prominent artists — many of whom have regional, national and even international renown — and to view their work in the artists’ unique creative environments. This year the tour venues have expanded to include all of Whidbey Island, from Oak Harbor and Coupeville to Greenbank, Freeland, Langley and Clinton.

Paintings, sculpture, pottery, jewelry, glass and fabric art, photography, furniture and other arts media will be represented. Among the notable artists are woodworking artist Gordon Grant and sculptor Ivan Neaigus; glassblowers TC and Lin Robertson; furniture maker Gary Leake; potter Dan Ishler; painters Pete Jordan, Sheila Mohn, Anne Waterman and many others.

A full-color ticket will provide artists’ statements and images of their art, along with a map to each studio. Tickets for the self-driving tour are $10. They are available at several Island outlets: Bayview Arts;Miriam’s Espresso, Coupeville; and Wind and Tide Book Shop, Oak Harbor; Island Framery in Clinton; Joe’s Island Music, Langley; the BookBay, Freeland; Sfoglia’s Fine Pastas & Gourmet Takeout in Freeland;

Go to www.whidbeyopenstudiotour.org.