And yet more.

Tidying, that is. I hope you are suitably impressed – it’s not something I do very often!

I decided it was time to tackle the scrap box – I have far too many scraps for a mere bag. I hauled it out from the bottom of the cupboard [I knew all that upper body work at the gym had a purpose] and threw out all the small, ugly or boring scraps. I now have a bin bag full to be thrown away – and the scrap box looks no emptier than it did before.

Something productive did come from it however – I sewed all the larger bits of navy fabric, together at random [a.k.a ‘liberated patchwork’], quilted the result, added the unfinished embroidery I found during the last spate of tidying, and finished - and made a cover for my contextualisation file [i.e. the place where I shove all the interesting arty bits I come across but can’t find a better home for].

I wish now I’d used more interesting thread to apply the embroidery, but I had forgotten that the quilting would shrink the fabric and I was convinced it wasn’t going to be big enough so I did it in a bit of a rush. Sort of like knitting quicker because you think the wool is going to run out.

Apart from that – I’ve been playing with Sumopaint. Again.

My plan is to get confident with Sumo, then go back to GIMP, which has more bells and whistles, and then when I am more confident with that – try Paint Shop Pro, which I have had for ages and which confuses me utterly. I did open it by mistake the other day – in the course of making this [bet you can’t guess who it is for] but closed it very quickly. As I say every time I use Word 2010 – it is possible to have too many choices…

But I digress. With Sumo I think I am beginning to get the beginnings of an inkling of a sort-of-understanding of layers.

I started with a gradient and attacked it with the blur and smudge tools so it went all – er - blurry and smudged.

 

 

 

New Layer!

I added some blobs with the Custom Shape tool, set to Smoothing mode and a highish mode value [50+]. The shape tools all fill in the shape they make with a gradient, so you can make them tone with the background.

 

New Layer!

I added more blobs with the Polygon tool, setting it to 8 sides, and with ‘Shape Trails’ ticked. If you swirl the cursor round and round and in and out, you get these shapes. I’m not saying what Wensleydale said about them.

Then I started playing with the Filters, which is when it dawned on me that, provided you haven’t merged the layers, the filters only work on the layer you have open, not all of them. [I’m sure you know this, but I didn’t.]

Suddenly, the filters in the 3D Effects group,which I had thought were boring – weren’t.

Like Reflection -

 

 

and Cylinder Designer

 

 

 

 

 

 

and Perspective Tiling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course I didn’t stop there.

This is one of the Wave Lab settings – I can't remember which.

 

 

 

 

 

This is [I think] Pixelate – Pixelate – but I could be wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

This is Pixelate – Mosaic – Cube. If I still did patchwork, I think this would look great in hand dyed fabric.

 

 

 

I made several more, but I think I have delighted you long enough.

I think the reason these work so well [well, for me they do!] is partly because of the background, and partly because the layer I applied the filters to has gaps in it. Oh, and they are purple.

This is Pixelate – Mosaic – Cube applied to the whole image. OK, but no banana.

 

There’s nothing on the telly tonight, so guess what I’ll be doing?