photo challenge. Yet another self portrait. With spots. As it’s a Babybel day, for this one I took the easy way out – no Photoshop, just one of the photos I took for the last self-portrait, and the abstract geometric filter from PostworkShop.
It’s been fun, and I’ve learned a lot about PSE which I am now attempting to transfer to Photoshop, but I’m glad of a break.
Now for some mark making!
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.]
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.
I need flowers. Not as much as I need gin and chocolate, but in the absence of the latter, flowers will have to do.
Especially as they are today's’ photo challenge.
For once, this effect is not from PFAEC, but a tutorial from ‘The Photographer’s Guide to Photoshop’ a ‘magbook’ I bought in Smith’s without realising that it is written for earlier versions of PS. [So is PFAEC, but I bought that second hand, not from a magazine display, which you expect to be current.] As Babybel has taken to saying ‘bum-bum’.
However, it gave me good practice in extracting an image, and I like the result, especially the reflection.
Why do I need flowers, chocolate and gin?
No real reason, it has just been a day of minor hassles – many of my own making.
The day started reasonably well. We wandered out to Haskins/Hobbycraft to buy:
The growbag was easy – but of course I can’t go into Hobbycraft and come out with just one thing [paper, card, rug making tools for some experimental rug making – no, I haven’t got time].
I intended to fill the basket with shredded tissue paper, add a selection of small prezzies, wrap it in cellophane and add a ribbon – but I looked at the not very exciting basket and thought it would look nicer with a lining. While I was looking for some lining fabric, a bit of wadding jumped out and told me it was the right size, and I could quilt the lining.
When I'd quilted it, I realised it was too stiff for my usual ‘gather the edges, as long as it’s a bit too big it will fit’, approach to basket lining – I had to tailor it, trim it to size, and hem it properly. I still haven’t sewn it in – nor have I bought the prezzies to go in it.
Note to self: do not decide to make a simple presentation far more complicated than it needs to be.
Then a friend phoned:
Note to self: do not talk on the phone for hours.
Then I looked at last night’s embroidery.
Note to self: do not decide to unpick last night’s mark making just because you don’t like it. ‘It’s only a sample’
Then I looked at the BBC news webpage.
Note to self: do not get addicted to Thornton’s drinking chocolate just before Thornton's decided to close the majority of their shops.
Tomorrow is half a college day – putting up the display for the end of year show, which starts on Thursday night and continues all day Friday and Saturday morning.
And then it’s a summer of sketchbooking, mark making, personal cloths and essay writing.
Can’t wait.
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 good night’s sleep, Wensleydale out and chores done meant that for the first time for ages I felt like doing some
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’, a
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 fav
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…
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….
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 on
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.
