Spring, No Really!

Himself brought me this Dogwood blossom that blew down in last night's storm. It cheered me up though the weather has gone back to being brr cold. This is supposed to be spring, not winter. The Redbuds are out, the Virginia bluebells, the Dogwoods, and the Iris' have their heads on. Now last year at this time, we had a horrible freeze, & all those poor things were frozen & died back. The Hostas looked bad all year, & everything looked just plain blah. Course the freeze was followed by the worst drought in about 100 years. So there ya go. But this Dogwood blossom, though fallen, brought me a bit of happiness for a while & will live on forever - digitally! Now everything isn't so bad.

3 of Hearts collage

Yes, I admit I have a problem. I really like flamingos! I don't know why exactly. Though the color is wonderful, and the seeming of gawkiness is endearing. They are different, but wonderful in their difference. Do I connect personally to this? Maybe, maybe. Meanwhile, I'll keep making collages with vintage flamingos and enjoying their beautiful gawky graceful differences!

Pink!

I think I have a "thing" for flamingos. I've been noticing a strange attraction toward them as I wander in antique stores & peruse Ebay. And now they seem to be littering my paper & computer files as well! Is it their wonderful color? Or the fact that they have those weird long legs? Or is it because it's cold now? The last one can't be totally true, 'cause this fascination started back before it got cold. Okay, I just realized as I typed this, that the other animal (yeah, I know the flamingo is a bird) I like the best & have for years is a ... wait for it... Giraffe! Both gawky, weird looking creatures. Should I be making the next available at the therapist's?

You may have noticed that there is no explanation of the collage today. Well, after much hard thinking, I decided that wasn't the direction this needed (or I wanted) to go. If there's a question, I'll try to answer it. Sometimes, there is a few days between the time I make a collage and the time I post it. And sometimes there is longer than that if I start & stop. Which can happen a lot if I hit a wall on something & move on & then come back. Then it's hard to remember what exact steps I've taken. So, rather than not putting anything on, I'd rather put my pieces up here with just a bit about them maybe, Maybe! And whatever else is on my mind. Within reason, of course. So, that's the new, gawky steps I'm taking. Just so you know, I'm well versed at falling & getting up again!

May the Force...Nah, I'm not gonna say it!

Force is a digital collage I made the other night when there was nothing on TV. I started with a picture I had taken with my Optio A20. I had to really zoom in because this particular butterfly was way across the field. I used the camera raw in Photoshop CS3 to deal with all the darkness in the background (that's pine woods back there) and to get the lighting & the sharpness back correctly. Then it was on to adding the little gears which I messed around with in the embossing option. The graph that is on the wing I distorted & warped. That & the one on the thistle I got from an 18th century encyclopedia. The blue arrows & circles are brushes that I distorted. On top of the photo I put a layer of the torn ledger paper and set it to overlay.

Door Stop.

So, it took me a while, & my muse had a field day with me, but I finally got this done. Almost what I had in mind when I started. This is a 9.5" X 7.5" mixed media collage on paper. I started with a watercolor background on watercolor paper. I added a printers block with Stazon ink. The 3 ladies on the left are copies from a vintage fashion mag. Then I used Golden gel medium to transfer them.I used Pearl Paints for the wash. The lady on the right is same one, only glued down with the gel medium. Then I used a bit of a Dover piece to transfer over her. (That's the Door). I added some pastel circles above, and hints of it around and about in the background. Then came the beeswax. For this piece, I wanted the wax to actually play a part in the coloring, so it is thicker in some places than in others. I added in a pastel red circle and spun it around with the mini iron to give it that movement look. I adhered the wooden beads with more wax. There's a lot of meaning in this for me. Seems more kept coming to me as I worked on it. I hope you can find something in it also.

Ya ever have one of those days?

How 'bout two of those days? Seems if I'm not fighting the InnerTube (see last message if you don't understand this word), I'm fighting my cell phone, my Photoshop, my printer, my art, my 4 cats, my head and I think that's it. Whew. They almost all turned into minor things of course. But, they all added up time wise, and worrisome wise. The cell still is out of service which ticks me off & makes me uncomfortable. "They" are "working on it". My Photoshop & printer issues were just me not knowing enough & also having 2 printers hooked up. The cats are about letting the new kittens up in the studio now. Yikes, teaching them where they can & can't go while I'm painting or transferring or gluing is stressful, no doubt about it! My art is the kicker, where I thought I was going to be finished yesterday, life interfered, then today, the piece started saying something else to me. I don't always like that, when they get ornery. I can be stubborn. But then I remember the Muse in charge & go with the flow. So the day is coming to a close, and no finished art. Well, I did just make a quick atc sized digital collage that expresses what I feel. But now it seems I'm having trouble uploading it! Wouldn't ya know, It's one of those days. I'll keep at it though. Success!! The green background is close up with my Nikon D70 of a door in GA. To this I added a cut out froma vintage book & gave it a drop shadow. Then the font with a drop shadow also. I thought this needed to be kept fairly simply because of the small size, strong colr of the background & the great lines in both the background & the little fellow. And so my art day closes.

A Day on the InnerTubes...

This is what happens when I spend a day riding the InnerTubes. That's what I like to call surfing the ole internet. I ran once again for I don't know how many times into Squidoo as I was looking for something, and said, Okay, I'll make a Lens. That's their term for a web page over there. So I needed a couple of pics, collages of course. And I sorta whipped these up in Photoshop. The bottom one is a brick wall background with a gradient fill behind it. I liked the way the bricks formed a grid on their side like that. The letters are some camo ones I downloaded a billion years ago. The flowers are from a photo I took last spring & applied filters to in Photoshop. The coffee pot is from a restaurant we ate in one morning, I just liked the way it looked. For this, I changed the perspective a bit & warped it & added the smoke & stain. The peppers are from a photo I took last summer. Yummers! The pot is sitting on a sepia version of one of our mantles and there is a vintage form in the background that I just faded out until all you could see was the lines. And now that's it, my downside is tired of riding in the InnerTube & I must pry myself out & do something else! Oh, Yeah...Be sure & check out my lens by hitting the button on the top right of this blog's front page. The one that says"check out my lens"!!

All together... P is for: Parrot!

I guess my muse was feeling very bubbly or something after a nice lunch of homemade fajitas and a beer, because this is what she wrought up in the studio today. Parrot is a mixed media on paper collage that measures 4.25" X 6.25".

My background is stenciled acrylic blue dots followed by washes of red & green watercolor crayon. I added two different printers blocks to get the grid/line patterns that I like so much. I used permanent pens for the text. The yellow is StazOn ink on a 99 cent stamp from Michaels that I got on sale. I'm using that StazOn just about all the time now when I need to use an ink pad. I find that it will cover most anything I'm doing. The link to the color page for the manufacturer is: http://www.tsukineko.com/store/cart.php?m=product_list&c=25 . I'm sure I'll end up with all the colors one day, they keep adding more. So anyway, back to the Parrot. The next step was adding a layer of beeswax. I used my little mini iron for this. I've been finding this is giving me a thinner layer of wax than starting with a brush. Next, I added with another layer of wax, the steps that I had cut out from a copy of a Dover book. Then came the vintage parrot from one of my scrapbooks, also added with wax.

Happy Halloween!

These are my final offerings on the Halloween 07 front. They are ATCs/ACEOs. Though the Pumpkin is slightly smaller.


The Witch in Training is a mixed media collage that started out in Photoshop CS3. I began with a vintage image of a boy with a red coat & white scarf that I transformed into a young witch to be. I added a Dover image of a pumpkin & cat. I put the background in next. Then I added the shadows of the pumpkin & the witch & put in a little color on the ground. I printed this out on my Epson 1800 printer on matte photo paper & stenciled in the with red Sharpie pen. I put on a layer of beeswax as a final step.


The Pumpkin is made on a recycled credit card that I got in the mail. You know those dreadful things that seem to come almost every day. So I sanded down the raised numbers then laid masking tape in strips on both sides, sometimes overlapping at odd angles. I added gesso on top of this. I then painted in the pumpkin using yellow, red, and blue acrylics. Sort of a study in 3 colors, if you will. This was quite enjoyable.


Okay, okay, so here's one more. A little Halloween gift/warning all wrapped up in a neat little 3.5" X 2.5" package! A vintage mother goose turned into a witch by way of some selective color fine tuning,added broom & shadow. Those "children" are pumpkins that I took a photo of last year at a local fall festival. I believe they were all decorated by kids. The background is lines over a simple gradient.

Yes, I do Dream in Color!

As evidenced by this rather lively digital 4" X 4" collage I just finished, my dreams can be quite colorful. I have been a birdwatcher for most of my life, & I guess that had some influence one night. This is sort of a representation of the bird I saw in my dream.

I began (in Photoshop CS3) with a vintage B&W English bird drawing/etching. I used the shape tool to make the diamond pattern which I then changed the perspective on & warped. I used masks for the blue & yellow colors. The red "dots" are brushes from the small tribal set from http://www.brushes.obsidiandawn.com, thanks Stephanie, you have some really cool brushes that I enjoy working with. The card is a little piece of ephemera with some math on it, that on which I used the perspective tool & added an inner shadow. The bird I added a double shadow of himself colored & then warped/used perspective & then a B&W version same thing but with a gradient added.

The background is a photo I took last spring of ferns popping up in our woods. I added an ironworks piece from Dover that I warped outward in the middle. I made sure some of the frets line up with the fiddlehead. I brought in an old newspaper in the background & lowered the fill as well as the opacity. I made sure the text went around the bird. And Bob's your Uncle, there you have "Bird Dream".

It's up to you, the viewer to figure out the meaning. Is the Bird caged? Is he outside looking in? Is the newspaper there as another hint at the caged status? Why is he on the card? Is he using that as his flying carpet? These and other questions will only be answered by your own internal dialogue.

The mind works in...

You know the rest. So I was in one of my favorite old-book book stores a few weeks back. I started noticing some of the things other than the books. Usually, seems we are in a hurry, gotta get other shopping done, or meet someone for lunch, dinner, that sort of thing. But not this time. Any way, I look up over this one aisle, and this puffer fish is just sorta hanging out. He was huge. And by the way, we do NOT live by the ocean! So out comes my little Pentax Optio A20 camera I keep in my pocket or purse for just such an occasion, & poof, he's mine!

Now he's become a spaceship called Possibility. Floats somewhere between land, sea, & air. He is a little bit country & a little bit city ( yeah rock & roll too probably...but that's another piece).

This is a 5.25" X 7" digital collage made in Photoshop CS3. The surround is an 1800's vintage card with the middle masked out & an old diagram of some sort put in with a gradient. There's also a cityscape behind that. And a melding of a couple of my wave pictures with masking again. There is an old school card that's been warped and brushed & shadow work done. I added a lighter shadow to the text to give it the look of being engraved into the card almost like stone. I did some additional brush work around the edges of the outer surface to round it out.

I have to thank my Sister for the great eye! She's a great lady angler/kayaker & is always sending pics of what they catch. This eye worked great, otherwise, I would have been hunting a long time for just the right thing.

Himself & I made some good progress on clearing up downstairs for the Great Exchange of the Studio. Actually got to the point where we could discuss where my various tables could go & the computer & how 'bout some new lighting. The Lad & his lovely Wife said yesterday when they were here, that they would take the bigger sofa that's down there. So little by little it is getting there.

Beginnings of a Vegetable Revolution?

No, I thought after having a particularly good tomato, that maybe they were jealous of all the attention the pumpkins were getting this time of year. Hence, Tomatoes Unite. I made this digital collage in a 5.25" X 7" format as that just seemed to be what fit my fancy for the layout. The whole thing is done in Photoshop CS3. I started with the vintage tomato from an 1800's scrapbook and using some filters & masking added a face from a line drawing of an ancient column. Then I made a background using the shape tool & warped it. I put a light brown filler layer behind that. I finished off with some grunge brush work after adding the shadow & text.

Actually, I think the tomatoes in the scrapbook are the main reason I bought it. They were so very vibrant in color. But I found a bunch of other gems in there also, that didn't register at first. This was the first time I wholesale took pictures of items rather than scanning them in. I didn't want to break up the scrapbook, and I felt like I would have more control over the end results as pictures, since I could open them in camera raw, even tho I wasn't shooting them in raw. I was just using my handheld camera since I figured it would be easier then my Nikon D70. But my little one is is still pretty powerful. So I think, all in all, the results were rather what I was hoping for.

It's a 3 Ring Circus...

No, it's a 3 Toed Sloth! That's what a day in the studio brought forth, so to speak. It' a 4" X 4" mixed media collage on paper starting with a black gesso on green background. I added yellow acrylic thick enough to drag a tool through to make those hatch marks, reminiscent of paste paper, or dare I say grids. Then on came the red lines, also acrylic. I had to add one of my printers blocks in a mustard yellow, it's barely visible, though you can see one of the words an upper left circle. The sloth was put on next with gel medium & puffed up a bit, rather 3 dimensional looking. Then the clown boy was transferred on from an ink jet print, using gel medium. The 3 is acrylic, as are the rings.

I just want to give a nod to the historical moment yesterday when the first female Commander of a shuttle docked with the first female Commander of a Space Station. I don't think when I was a kid I thought such a thing would happen. It seemed like an all male field like so much of the world.

I am NOT Blue, but this collage is!

B is for Blue is the photoshop collage I made today, after making a lovely turkey lasagna. Yummy. But the actual yellow color was the first thing I was thinking of. And that was radiating outward, in a sun fashion...almost in a Van Gogh style. ( yeah right, I wish....but that is what I keep inside of me) I pulled the background from some vintage ephemera & tweaked the color. Also added a ledger page. I used masks, gradients, and clipping masks to get the black & white vintage fish & bird to look colorful & woven in the circle. I like the way they came out with a tattooed look. I added an inner glow to the "B" & then warped it to get it the way I wanted. I added and erased layers of various shades of blues with grunge brushes as the final steps. In case I didn't say up front, this is 4" X 4".

The Road to...Too Much News or ?

I don't know if it's the news about all the horrendous wildfires in California, or what is now day 4 of migraines and the resultant medication, but this is today's offering: Devil's Auction. It's a 4" X 4" Photoshop collage using a variety of brushes, effects, and filters on a Dover background. The devils come from some vintage ephemera that I have added to, and the bird is a photo I took. The gravestone with the sign on it started as a bluish background. To this I added a curved top, warped it, then added a stone pattern and overlayed a new color. All in all, it came out like I wanted from the beginning. Now that doesn't always happen.

I don't go up to my studio when I'm migraining, as I really don't feel very steady on my feet, usually. And the muse is too busy protecting herself from the evil icepicks slamming into my head to be concerned with art. Then when the magic pills kick in, she is too loopy be very good artistic help. So we sit back and wait it out, 4 days this time. Oh well. It could be worse, I could be not having the magic pills!

It is October, after all:

I grabbed one of my old 1800's books off the table this morning & Halloween's muse or serendipity or something interceded. As I opened the book, it landed on the page with the bat skeleton. An thus we have the 2.5" X 3.5" collage ATC/ACEO entitled "BAT". And the thing is, I had really sat down to scan & print some things to take up to the studio, but nope, ended up doing this in Photoshop CS3. This has been one of those weeks where I spent most of my time on the computer, either making collages, or cleaning up files, or simply learning new things.

For the orange and gray background, I used a gradient and texture pattern and clipped that to the skeleton layer. I also used a gradient on the text along with a color stroke overlay on the inner position. That's a grunge brush on the outer edges making the scratch marks.

We finally had some rain through the night, but nothing that will do the trick when it comes to the severe drought we're in. But, every little bit helps, at this point. Today was warm again. Ah, well, I should store these up for when the cold, cold days of winter finally arrive.

She won't need a metal detector for this...

Not anything I find beach combing! I started this 4" X 4" collage with a gray/black/white paper cutout of a figure from the 20's or 30's. I bought a bunch of these, they looked like something I could have fun with.Used Photoshop CS3 to add the patterns & colors. The sand/ground background is actually a picture of some mardi gras beads swirled by a filter, covered by what would be a pink colored gesso in real life (!) & the "sanded" back off to reveal bits of it. The ocean is one of my pics, & the glowing orb is NASA's pic of Mars, with my glow added by way of the layer mask. And I think it is no longer required to mention "my" grid. The text was done with a clipping mask.

A girl never forgets her first best friend.

The gal in this 6" X6" photo collage is from a large picture I picked up along the way that's dated 1927. She is just one of many ladies all dressed in costume for a grand time. (Not Halloween, as it's dated 1/15/27). I added the colors to her & Teddy that I thought she might like. Then set her in what used to be a light greenish-yellow photo album cover. I like changing the flowers to make them more stencil looking. Then there is my usual grid in the background, can't help it, gotta have it. And a technique to make unryu paper appear as if it has been collaged on top. I think the "Teddy" looks like gel pen or thick acrylics, with black marker outlining it.


I picked up Lynne Perrella's "Beyond Paper Dolls" to start reading last night, and as I just scanned it, I told "Himself" "These aren't your mother's paper dolls". And the first sentence in chapter one (not the intro) starts out "They're not your grandmother's paper dolls." I had to tell that to Himself & we both cracked up. So far, the book is just beautiful & inspirational & a joy. Truly worth the money and the wait.

Roc Chic Take 2

Got another Architecture gal today. Spent most of today fighting with various things on my computer. Just one of those days, I guess. Still haven't gotten into the new books. Been very busy.


Kept waiting for rain, after all, it was cloudy today. We haven't had but one meager rain day in almost 3 months. Very parched around here.

Roc on Chics

So , some excitement here, as I get ready to celebrate my birthday 3 months late! The postman brought my long overdue from the great bookstore on the InnerTube books: "Transparent Art" edited by Somerset Studio, & "Beyond Paper Dolls" by Lynne Perrella. I've only had a chance to peek into them. But thought I'd dig into my files & pull out one of my Roc Chics to commemorate the occasion. I started making a few of these back last winter. They are all from bits of architecture pulled from here & there & mashed together in CS3. I did the coloring for this one in CS3 also.

"Himself" & I have still been working a little each day on getting the downstairs ready for my studio. It's a ton of work. But then I go up to my studio, & I wonder how in the world we are ever going to move all my stuff down 2 flights of stairs. I got a lot of stuff. I mean supplies!