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!
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.
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].
and today’s photo challenge was particularly challenging – so I’m not sorry that I cheated a bit with it – well, quite a lot really.
So here’s one I made earlier.
The challenge was ‘bokeh’ – which I had to Google – and I’m still not sure if it means an out of focus background, or those circular blobs, or both, or neither.
I did try a couple of tutorials on how to make your own bokeh backgrounds but they were written for Photoshop, and I couldn’t get my brain round them for PSE – so the first cheat was to use a pre-made texture I found on the web. Well, the second cheat, I suppose, as I could have tried to take a bokeh photo with my camera instead of Photoshopping it. Yeh, right.
So this is the view of the Needles from Highlife Castle, with added blobby bits, and a darkish filter to make it look mysterious.
If I'd made it even earlier I could have cheated even more and used it for ‘silhouette’ as well…
It’s another colour I don’t have much of – if you know what I mean, but it’s today’s challenge topic.
Fortunately the packaging industry is much keener on orange than I am – which means that a quick glance through my litter photos and a lot of muttering and swearing over Photoshop produced this. For once, it isn’t a PFAEC effect – just an extracted image, a textured background, and a trawl through the filters till I found one I liked.
And for once – I've done some sewing. Nothing at all
Of course, now it’s clouded over, and we are bracing ourselves for the arrival of [grand]father’s day well-wishers, so the beading has had to be put away.
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?
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.
‘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…
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 ‘Expres
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…
Ouch.
As you may have guessed from that dreadful pun, today's challenge is ‘eyes’.
After struggling for a time with the question of how you photograph your own eyes, I realised it didn’t actually specify my eyes.
So I found an unwilling and somewhat wriggly model, and after taking lots of photos of fur and ears and other bits we won’t mention, managed this.
Just be glad you’re not a mouse.
Another attempt at the ‘Fauve’ effect from PFAEC – seemed appropriate, somehow.
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 da
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’…
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 loos
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>.
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…
to take a photo from a high angle – while Monday’s was, perhaps unsurprisingly, to take one from a low angle. Both of which said ‘stairs’ to me. I did think of lying down in the garden and photographing the trees and sky but there was too much of an overlap with ‘clouds’ and ‘green’ so I abandoned that idea.
I took several shots from the top of the stairs but the one which appealed most was this one – my attempt at the ‘lith printing’ effect from ‘Photoshop Fine Arts Effects Cookbook’. I wanted to get a slightly spooky B-movie effect and this is the closest I got.
Looking the other way, I tried the ‘Polaroid transfer’ effect. That border isn’t quite right, but I enjoyed adding the wiggles.
That – and a bit of knitting - is about all the creative stuff that’s happened recently. I hope to get something college-related done tomorrow afternoon – although I suppose improving my Photoshop skills is college related. Wonder if I should put these in my PMS?
a few more to go. Modules, that is. I handed in Module 9 today, although I was still finding interesting book artists last night – or rather this morning, after insomnia struck again. Enjoyed it [the RP, not the insomnia], but I'm glad it’s done. The draft of Module 11 is due next week, and then there are no more deadlines until next term – apart from the end of term show.
We all had tutorials on the PMS and the Personal Cloths – or in my case the Personal Papers. Obviously, if I’m going to work in paper, there is an overlap between the two, but I suggested that the PMS would be about the structure of books, and the PCs about the contents, and that was acceptable – although it was strongly suggested that either might wander off in other directions and that would be OK.
Now all there is left of the second year of the degree is two sessions of peer review, photographing the sketchbooks from drawing studies for video display in the exhibition, setting up the display and stewarding it. Not sure where the two years have gone.
Insomnia did give me a chance to play around with some more of my photos in PSE. Challenges 3&4 are ‘clouds’ and ‘something green’. For some reason I often seem to photograph clouds when I go to Walford Mill, so I took some more when we went there yesterday.
Guess what the weather was like? I did try photoshopping this one, but it wasn’t improved by the process, so this is the original.
I wanted to avoid the obvious solution for ‘something green’ – but there are very few green things around here, apart from the obvious. I did assemble a green still life – knitting bag, watering can, water bottle, potted plant – but I am clearly no Cezanne and the result looked dreadful, so I drifted down the garden and found some cobnuts, which the squirrels haven’t got
I took some photos, one of which looked like this – a combination of the wind and, I think, a bit of stray finger on the right.] By the wonders of PSE I combined it with a better one
Day 9’s challenge is ‘someone you love’ – and tomorrow is Babybel day – so guess who that will be? [Sorry, Wensleydale.]
