And Another...

Part digital, part real-world cut-and-paste. The Force no longer appears to be with me today - try as I might, I can't get much father in the (so-called) Digital Darkroom, so I just did a little of this, a little of that...and came up with this.

The background is two of Matthew's photos, digitally altered & layered. Then, the Spirit of the Photoshop having departed my presence, I just did a little rubber stamping on top of the print.

What does it mean? I don't know, it's just what I did this morning.

My First Digital Layering Attempt!

Spent all day yesterday (Valentines' Day - a big snowstorm) knocking my brains out trying to figure out how to do some very rudimentary work in Photoshop, and this is one of my 2 results.

Since I've been working with various methods of inkjet transfers and getting very frustrated with the lumpy uncertain results I've been getting (still working on it though- it's lots of fun!), I thought I would try to achieve similar results digitally - the ol' digital darkroom and all that, dontcha know. Well, since I don't know the first thing about working in Photoshop (and I'm in an old version, 6.0), my puny attempts felt like reinventing not only the wheel but all of civilization from the original primordial grains of dirt. But I DID IT! (with lots of IM help from Matthew, who was most obliging and very patient with my ignorance).

So what is it? Well, I started with a really cool photo of a weathered, rusty culvert that I snitched from Matthew's Flickr photos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/barge/), and I messed around with hue, saturation, and contrast till it looked pretty much nothing like the original, just a layer of texture & color. Then I took a scanned image of a very beautiful painting of a water lotus (someone else's work - don't know where it came from or who made the original), layered it on top of the altered image from Matthew's photo, and made it semi-transparent, so that the lotus flower emerges in a ghostly fashion from the background. I'm not entirely satisfied with the finished result - but I am supremely happy that I have made the first steps towards learning how to manipulate images digitally.

Sounds so simple, doesn't it? I'm sure it is very simple, for anyone who knows how to do it. Well, isn't everything pretty simple once you've mastered the skills necessary for each step? But I am a rank beginner, working with my usual scientific method of randomly pushing buttons whose names don't seem to have any relation to their actual function and are therefore utterly inscrutable to me, until something happens. Then, should I manage to achieve an effect I like, I am unable to replicate it since I have no idea of what it was I did. But I will continue to work with the digitals, stealing the incredible photographs done by my artsy kids and layering them with odd snippets and seeing what I can come up with. At least all this working in Photoshop doesn't get my fingers all gluey or use up my precious supplies.

SoulCollage Cards

Yo! I did it again! Now I've got the Flickr.com thing down, and the scanning/uploading thing, AND the posting pictures to my so-called blog thing.

Now all I need is something to say - here's where I freeze up. Ever known me to be short of words before? Don't worry, it won't last long.

I remember now - I started this whole Blog thing so that I could share my SoulCollage (c) cards without hogging up space on the group website. Maybe the main purpose of this blog will be to share my work & processes with my fellow-minded artsy friends. I want to ask for genuine feedback, but I'm very new at this, and very tender about the whole business of "putting myself out there", as they say. I fear looking like a fool. Saying "Here - look at what I made" seems very arrogant somehow, or - even worse - as if it might appear arrogant. Like I'm all "here, look how cool I am, now you have to tell me I'm very clever or artsy or 'creative' or whatever" - when my real intention is just to share my work with others who are into the same kind of thing.

That's not what I'm here for. Nor do I have the currently-popular "low self esteem" issue; it's not that I think what I do sucks, it's just that showing others (family! friends! strangers!) what I do, in a field outside of my comfort zone (quilts, anything fiber-related - I'll show that stuff to anybody, anytime!), is new and nerve-wracking to me. So OK, I know what to do: I'll post another thing right up here & shut the hell up already!

OK. This is another Soul Collage card, called "Above and Below". I think I need to figure out how to put captions under the pics - probably there's a way to do that, right?

Let's try this...

Hey, look at this! After 45 minutes of hacking away at the attempt, I've finally managed to post a picture! I am a brilliant modern woman of the 21st century after all - I was biginning to doubt myself, just for a few minutes there...

So this is one of the playing cards I made for Matthew this Christmas. I got a set of blank regulation poker cards (Blue Bicycle design on the back) from SkyBluePink.com and went to work with my special things - acrylic paints, Lumieres, and rubber stamps (the numbers/suits stamps also from SkyBluePink), using the expensive & stinky StazOn ink. There are more to come (51, to be exact, though I promise not to post them all!); I just wanted to use this scanned image (thanks, Matthew) to see if I could do it.

And now I see that I can!

Cathy Enters the 21st Century!

I'm not entirely clear exactly what a "blog" (what an ugly word!) is exactly, or what it's for, or why I should want one in the first place, but here I am. Hey, I'm a with-it kind of girl, I "show up", as we say in the New Age lingo.

I've created this blog because one of my Yahoo groups suggested it as a way to share pictures of our work - I guess the allotted space for that group is filling up fast. Pretty soon I'll figure out how to post photos & stuff. We'll see how that goes - first I'll have to figure out how to ever find this space again!

I might have a lot to say. I might get stage fright and clam up. Who knows? Odds are that before the new year arrives I'll have forgotten I ever created a blog. Or if I remember that I started one, I'll forget where it is. Gee, this could be a whole new variation on "hiding my own Easter eggs"!

Okay, I'll so-called "talk" to you later. And how do I put photos on here, which was supposed to be the whole point of the thing anyway...?