Three for the price of one.

A combination of college, Babybel and a stomach bug you don’t want to read about has made me get a bit behind with the photo challenge.

College was busy, but more productive for me personally than it has been for a while. I got my draft essay back [no problems, go away and write it], had my photos taken and, in a very positive peer review session, got some good suggestions about my 3D piece and about how I should present it in the exhibition. I don’t know whether I’ll have time/motivation to make changes to the piece itself, but the suggestion about display was easy to follow up, involving only a trip to Staples, which is conveniently close to Babybel’s nursery. All I need to do now is remember to take some scissors and our long arm stapler next week for construction purposes. The great advantage of making something deliberately grungy is that you can make the presentation grungy too…

The down side was that we were unexpectedly given more homework – the  obscurely phrased ‘Mark as stitch x 50’ – which I take to mean 50 examples of stitch used to make marks. This is on top of the [non-draft] version of the essay, and the open-ended Personally Managed Sketchbook and Personal Cloths. The up side of that is that I feel quite enthused about stitch as mark [SAM?] – perhaps because it will be nice to get back to doing some proper stitch.

I did think of stitching on used colour catchers, assuming I’ve got 50, but in the middle of an insomniac morning, decided a better idea would be to find one of my large pieces of too-multicoloured-to-use-in-a-proper-piece hand dye, and work into that, rather as I might doodle on a randomly painted piece of paper. Of course finding a suitable piece was more difficult than I anticipated – too small, too big, too dominating a pattern, too good to use for that – but I did find this, and a selection of threads which may or may not match, because I picked them out in artificial light.

So have I got started on all this homework? Of course not. After mucking around with PSE, I spent the afternoon sitting in the conservatory [pleasantly warm if not sunlit] and working on the beaded bag, which I feel I ought to finish before starting anything else. And drinking tea and listening to Radio 3’s ‘Light Music Weekend’, which is a delight for anyone brought up with the Light Programme in the 50s.

But I digress – back to the photo challenge.

Wednesday's was ‘Hands’. This started off with the Surreal photomontage effect from PFAEC, but got simplified and filtered.

 

 

 

Thursday was ‘Sunflare’, but not much sun, so I used a holiday photo which needed a bit of sun added to it.

 

And today’s is ‘Animal’, for which there was really only one choice.

Quality Control meets the Cubists – or rather the Cubism effect from PFAEC, with afterthought sepia/glow in Picasa. She really needed more cubes and more distortion, but I think I was up to 25ish layers before I got bored and gave up.

 

 

 

 

These will probably be the last photos for which I use PSE, as my student’s version of CS5 arrived today [very prompt service from Adobe, Germany to Hampshire in 2 days!] so I’m looking forward to playing with that while continuing to enjoy a nostalgic weekend on Radio 3.