Busy busy busy…

Having a college-free morning, I buckled down and tidied the workroom. Sort of. Put print-outs in the right places, emptied the bins, put some bits of fabric away – so now you can see the floor and a bit of work space.

It won’t last.

Then off to college to assemble my plinth wrapped in corrugated card with a tatty cardboard box on top of it. This was a relatively quick process - apart from taking all the cardboard off and remounting it with the corrugations outside 'cos Miss thought it would look better – and it did. Note to self – always make sure your display doesn’t have to be hung on the wall or from the ceiling so you don’t have to wait for a man to come and erect things for you. [Double entendre intended – sorry, I’ve got that sort of mind.]

Since I got home I finished this – which I mentioned a while ago and then went very quiet about. It got shelved for a while because it had got to the machine sewing stage and I was more in the mood for sitting in sunshine with a bit of hand sewing. But as part of the deck clearing, I decided to finish it. Not sure about the flap, and I think the button will have to be moved, but it holds the essentials better than the elderly black one I've been using.

 

For those who remember a tirade I posted ages ago about small bags, I should point out that this my little bag – I also carry a bigger one with all the rest of my junk in it – other specs, drawing kit for Babybel,  shopping bags, rain hat, extra tissues, camera etc. etc. etc.

So now that is out of the way I have no more excuses for not getting started on SAM, PMS, PCs and essay - not even the photo challenge, which ends tomorrow.

The penultimate challenge is ‘black and white’. Now, PFAEC has lots of recipes for turning your colour images B&W, but the effect I fancied for the image I wanted to use wasn’t one of them. I wanted something moody, and ‘Nocturnes’ inspired by Whistler, seemed to fit the bill - so I decided to try the Nocturnes effect and remove the colour afterwards.

I think I was a bit heavy handed with some of the steps so it’s a bit cartoonish, but I’m quite pleased with it. Can you imagine Heathcliff behind those windows? [For those who don’t know it, it’s Haworth Parsonage, where the Brontes lived.]

Tomorrow is the final self portrait - will Cheshire reveal her true face to the world at last?

Not bum-bum likely. 

Yesterday was ‘close up’ -

here’s the same Jaume Plensa sculpture ‘from a distance’.

To give you some idea of scale, the red blob is a person inside the sculpture. The effect is ‘Seurat’ from PFAEC.

I am fascinated by this piece – does the fact that it is made of letters make it a book? Probably not – but it inspires some interesting ideas.

 

Knowing that today would be Babybel and gym day, I worked on the image yesterday – and I’m glad I did because today has been so hot and humid, I have little energy for anything challenging.

I will probably manage some more work on SAM tonight – I made 2,3,4,or 5 marks yesterday, depending on how you count them.

Is this one or two marks? I’m counting it as two, even though they overlap, because they are not conceptually related to each other - [‘ark at ‘er!]– apart from both being inspired by the dye marks on the cloth.

 

I have decided  that this is also two. The little blue blobs were worked over splatter marks, and I’m counting them as one mark. The others were an exploration of related ideas, so also count as one mark.

The block on the right, which reminds me of rhubarb, was inspired by the colour exploration I did yesterday – using embroidery floss and changing the proportion of red to green by one strand each time. Then I tried a similar idea but changing the number of strands in the needle each time. I’m tempted to have another go with machine embroidery thread, which I hope is even finer than floss – how minimal can a mark be before it ceases to be a mark? 

I did look up the word in a dictionary yesterday: lots of interesting ideas came out of that, including holes and symbols. But I can’t make up my mind how 3D a ‘mark’ is – and what about texture? I tried thinking about art media marks – the difference between pencil marks and paint marks, for example – and of course paint can be textured and 2.5D if not 3…

Is it just me who wastes spends time thinking deep thoughts about questions like this? Does everyone else just get on with it? It’s interesting, though, and looks like being a good cure for insomnia.

One decision I have made is that somewhere there will be a big red ‘X’ …

A sunny day…

a good night’s sleep, Wensleydale out and chores done meant that for the first time for ages I felt like doing some college work!

I started with a little painting for the PMS. Somebody recommended this book, and when it came I saw why, but I hadn’t got round to doing anything with it. But on a sunny day, what could be nicer than sitting in the conservatory with some paint and a sketch book?

 

The first two exercises are  ‘wet into wet’ [the circles] and ‘wet into dry’ [the squares]. They are simple enough not to deter the least confident watercolour user [i.e. me], and, once I got going, fun. Because I was using these two little sketchbooks, in which I’d collaged some bit of paper, I ended up using the techniques as colour exercises, based on the papers, and I could have gone on all morning. But it got very hot in the conservatory, so I drifted out into the garden to look for ‘marks’ – as in ‘stitch as mark x 50’, aka SAM.

This made me wonder what a mark is, anyway [according to W. it’s a stain], but I did end up with a collection of photos of lichen, bark, planks and peeling paint – which tells you a lot about our house and garden, really…  These are the edited highlights. I love that daisy-like shape in the top row, which is knot marks in the fence.

After lunch I went out and tried to draw some of them, before deciding that a pen wasn’t a good idea and I’d have been better off with my favourite oil pastels.

So I fired up Photoshop for today’s challenge –’close-up’. This is a photo I took of a Jaume Plensa sculpture at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last month – I’ll show you the whole thing tomorrow, which is ‘from a distance’. The effect, from PFAEC as usual, is ‘intaglio’ – and was much easier than it looks. Yes, the letters are back to front, but that is not because I reversed it, it’s because I was inside the sculpture when I took the picture. Obviously.

When I’ve finished writing this, I'm going to sit down outside, if it’s cooled off enough, and sew a stitched mark or two while W. sands down the window sills. Mmm – wonder who’s got the best bargain there? I will make him a cup of tea to keep him going first…

Pretty in Pink

Today’s challenge is ‘something pink’. Pink is yet another colour I don’t have a lot of – and what I do have is either unexciting [a polo shirt] or something [unspecified] I do not intend to post a photo of on the net.

Fortunately on one of our Babybel walks [now there's someone who has a lot of pink] I photographed a dog rose. 

This started off as an attempt at the ‘fine art flowers’ effect from PFAEC, but I failed to notice that there were 4 pages of instructions for the effect, not the usual two, found the half-way point a bit uninspiring, and added a filter.

It is my first full Photoshop effort, and I’m quite please with it, although I could do without those blue blobs.

I enjoyed myself with PS, although there are a few differences to PSE which I’ll have to get used to. At least it hasn’t got the dreadful black on black controls, which to my mind are close to infringing disability discrimination legislation….

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.

Self portrait? Again?

This time the photo challenge is a faceless self portrait – of course, in my case, there is no other sort.

This is an attempt at the ‘Powerful Portraits’ effect from PFAEC. [Don’t laugh.]

It was somewhat restricted by the difficulty of taking a photo holding the camera above my head – and that the effect relies quite heavily on Photoshop bells and whistles that I don’t have in PSE. And that, from the look of it, my hair needs washing …

College tomorrow, so a certain amount of slippage may occur. More photography, though this time it will be by someone who knows what he is doing - for the end of year exhibition [Thursday evening on 30th June, all day Friday 1st July and the morning of Saturday 2nd July, at the Desborough Centre, if anyone is interested]. 

Day 18?

Where has June gone?

Today's photo challenge was ‘your shoes’.

Good job I told you, wasn’t it? This is the ‘abstract watercolour’ effect from PFAEC – it could have been less abstract and more recognisable, but you may be able to spot a couple of shoe-like objects in there – there are actually 5 and a bit.

Apart from that, all I’ve done today, apart from the boring bits, of course,  is take out a second mortgage and order the full Photoshop – student edition while I’m still a student <g>. Just hope Adobe accept that I am – ordering it it is a complex process involving scans of supporting documentation…

Addicted? Me?

Still faffing about…

doing a little Photoshopping – and making a lot of unsuccessful attempts to get Opera to talk to Gmail, without success. It had started downloading 2 or 3 of most messages, so I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it – and now it won’t download any…

I may have to return to Microsoft after all, since I have tried Thunderbird twice without ever getting it to work properly.

So here is today’s photo challenge - ‘technology’. I tried the ‘Futurists’ effect from PFAEC, on a picture I took at Hollycombe Steam Museum last autumn.

Babybel loved these cars so much it was almost impossible to get her off them.

And number 16 is…

‘long exposure’.

I have been experimenting with increasing the exposure time on my little point and shoot, but all I got was blurrrrrrr. So I turned to my new bible, PFAEC, and the first effect in the ‘Photographers’ section, daguerreotypes. The outline specifically mentions that these involved long exposures, leading to blurring of moving objects, like water.

I cheated again and used a holiday photo – Daguerre comes to Yorkshire. Still not got the border the way I want it, but I’m working on it…

Here’s one I prepared earlier…

since it was college today and I knew I wouldn’t have the time or the energy to work on today's photo challenge.

The topic was ‘Silhouette’. I tried the ‘Expressionism’ effect from PFAEC, but just couldn’t get it to work, so with a judicious bit of selecting, cutting and mucking about  with filters,  I ended up with this.

Guess who?

 

 

College was a bit undirected because we are on ‘student directed work’. I made 2 and a bit books, using some of my photos and a bit of plain paper for a fold -out. The blue cover is cut from a plastic notebook cover.

I’m experimenting with single sheet sewings from this [and let me assure you I did NOT pay anything like that much for it!].

 

They are fun to do, but I’m not sure that they are what I want to use for my litter books. I’m swithering at the moment between books with grungy covers – like the one with a card cover – and ones with beautifully bindings to contrast with litter photos inside. Which assumes I’m capable of making a beautiful binding, of course…

I’ve caught up…

but I expect to fall behind again tomorrow!

Days 11 & 12 of the 30 day photo challenge are ‘something blue’ and ‘sunset’: one of these was much accessible than the other.

There are a lot of blue things around here, apart from jeans – sofas, curtains, carpet, vases, crockery, towels, eyes – yes, we like blue.

So what to choose? I've already discovered that I’m too impatient to spend time arranging still lives, and carpets and curtains seemed a bit restrictive – so I pulled a few things out of the sideboard, and photographed them individually, before deciding to go with this.

In case you can’t work out what it is, it’s a millefiori paperweight – which is blue – just not this blue!

This is the ‘silkscreen’ effect from PFAEC, which gave lots of practice in extracting shapes and using layers – and I managed to work out how to add a frame border –PSE calls it a border, who am I to argue?

‘Sunset’ was rather more of a challenge: yesterday was overcast, so no sunset, and I’ve given up expecting one today as it has been raining heavily all day [has summer come?]

So I cheated.

When we went to ‘Another Place’ last month, I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t a proper sunset, although I did take some photos of the light on the water.

 

 

 

PFAEC has an effect called ‘luminous landscape’ – or in my case, seascape. 

Quite pleased with that.

Tomorrow is Babybel and gym, so I don’t know if I’ll have the time to tackle ‘Myself with 13 things’…

A bit of book making…

and a bit of drawing took place today – as well as rather more photography.

The drawing was 2 minute continuous line sketching – I am doing more of this, and blind contour drawing, in an attempt to loosen up.

The books were quick, ad hoc things – after a morning with Babybel, good as she is, I didn’t have the energy for much else!

This, as you can see, is recycled yoghurt packaging. [Love those toffee ones]. One of my problems with getting interested in litter is that most litter seems to be things like cigarette and crisp packets, sweet wrappings and drinks cans and bottles – none of which we have around – and I can’t bring myself to pick them up…

This is much more salubrious – an off cut of hand made paper turned into an accordion book, I thought the flowers were interesting, but it needs something to bring out the patterns I cut in the inner layer.

By tomorrow I should be up to date with the photography challenge – if I can manage another two. Today’s are ‘someone you love’ and ‘a childhood memory’. I used PSE and PFAEC for both but I’m not completely enamoured with the results, and I’ve resorted to Picasa and Picnik to finish them off.

This is Babybel in the ‘echo tunnel’ on our Thursday walk. It’s an attempt at a ‘Fauve scene’ from PFAEC, but I was too heavy handed with the black lines, I think. I added some glow with Picasa which has improved it a bit.

 

 

 

and this sad gentleman is my childhood memory – my one legged, earless Ted, pop-arted a la PFAEC. I managed to work out how to add the text in PSE, but not how to get it into a speech bubble – and adding a frame was  completely beyond me, so that was done in Picnik.

I’m feeling a bit like Ted at the moment, as yesterday my GP confirmed what I have suspected for a while – that I have arthritis of the hip – and possibly back and neck as well. So it is time for X-rays, [just like Wensleydale], and probably physio [just like Wensleydale], and hydrotherapy [just like Wensleydale]. But if that lot does for me what it’s done for him, I’ll be a new woman <g>.

Numbers 7 & 8…

of the 30 day photography challenge are ‘Fruit’  and ‘A bad habit’.

So here is a ‘portrait’ of some very unripe apples in the garden, with my attempt at the Dutch Portrait effect from Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook, hereinafter known as PFAEC. I like this hint of a tint – might be good for litter images.

 

 

 

And rather too edible,  my newly acquired bad habit, some Botham’s ginger biscuits which came back with us from Yorkshire. [W’s mother lived in Whitby, home of Botham’s, so this was an exercise in nostalgia as well as biscuity excellence.] Unfortunately we ate the last two today.

This started as the ‘Modernism’ effect in PFAEC, but morphed a bit, in my attempt to make it less obvious what they are.

By tomorrow I should have caught up, but we have an extra Babybel morning, so maybe not…