Leaping Man

Leaping man - digital collage

I've recently received a couple very old scrapbooks. One is from my great-grandmother and the other is from my grandmother (both on my father's side). In one of the scrapbooks, I found an odd little magazine clipping of a performer named Hal Sherman. The promotional photograph was from a revue called "Hellz-a-Poppin." I don't know who the writer was but Sherman was referred to as "..a misfit, a little man in a big world; still a tramp, but a worldly Broadway tramp, a bitter, dancing humorist of the banana-peel school." I like that.

I created the background by scanning a hand-written letter from my great-grandmother and repeating and overlapping the text. The "leaping man" is Sherman.

Quilt of the aerialist

I have been "working" on this piece for a while (since this past autumn, I believe). I took the photograph of an aerialist at an event at Smoke Farm a couple years ago. First, I worked on it in Photoshop - masked out the background, added the repeating textured background, filtered and adjusted the entire image. Next, I printed it on a Habotai silk specifically made to go through a printer (visit dharmatrading.com to see other fabrics that are ready to print in your printer). I then added quilt batting and backing. After that, I stitched the vertical lines. Finally, I added the binding. This is only the second time I've bound a quilt, so it's a bit of a struggle and a little wonky looking, but it does the trick. My final step will be to create a hanging loop to the back and add a dowel so I can hang the piece from the wall. 

I have another piece that includes the same woman in this position and two other positions. Eventually, I'll figure out how I'm going to turn it into something I can display.

A vision of crows

My piece from Quotes Illustrated

I got the go-ahead to show my artwork that is published in Quotes Illustrated by Lesley Riley. This is a digital collage that has scans of painted surfaces and black and white negatives that I further manipulated in Photoshop. I was happy that I was given the Diane Arbus quotation since she's one of my photo heroes.

Fresh art

I've recently committed to doing at least one hour of art every day. I try to give myself a list of the projects I'm working on and my next actions so I can just start when it's time. One of my projects is putting together a collection of 100 digital prints. The goal is to print the digital images and have them in a physical collection ready to show when necessary. This has forced me to troll through my Lightroom catalog to look for images that go together or that I want to manipulate in Photoshop.

Here is an example of some sort of tree seed/pod that I photographed a while back. I made some preliminary adjustments in Lightroom and then moved to Photoshop and played around with a variety of plug-in filters I have. I'm pretty pleased, though I think I'd like to see some sort of texture over the top of the image.

Old tintype

I've been trying to photograph every day, but today I got caught up in scanning a bunch of old photos from my great aunt's scrapbooks. With that came some online searches for a place I knew as a kid and people that Pat was friends with. The day seemed to escape from me (as it does when I get sucked into the rabbit hole of the web...perhaps I should say something silly like, "caught in the web of the web" - ugh!).

There was a tintype in Pat's collection that may have been of her mother. I can't really tell but I see a similarity to another photo that has "your mother" written on the back. The tintype is pretty damaged but the picture is intact. I did a little Photoshop work but wasn't really interested in doing a ton of restorative work on it today. If this was my great-grandmother, then the girl is Mary Louise Butler who was born in 1887 and died about 5 weeks after I was born in 1965.

Mary Louise Butler?

Detail

Alternative Processes - Done Digitally

I've been spending quite a bit of time working on recreating alternative processes using Photoshop. I've had varying degrees of success. I've been a bit stymied by gum bichromate. Fortunately, I've finally managed to get something that feels more true to the process than my previous attempts.

3-colour digital "gum bichromate"

Here is the original image that I started with:

I'll have to see how I like it when I print it on nice paper.

This is an example of a "cyanotype" I created as well:

All in all, I feel as though I'm moving forward and learning how to reproduce the techniques a bit better. It will still be digital approximation of the techniques, which I'm preferring to look at as more freeing rather than a lesser imitation of the original processes. I've dealt with the chemistry and the fussiness of the processes before and feel as though it was enough. I'm happy to deal with digital fussiness which also means less toxicity.

A Photoshopped piece

I tried to create a woodcut-like print image with this digital photo of Mt. Rainier. I used layer adjustments and filters to turn the image from a digital color shot to a "print." It looks really good printed on cold press natural paper as well. I've included the original picture for comparison.

Photoshopped view of Mt. Rainier

The original photo

Work-free Monday

What a delight to have 9 days off in a row. Yesterday, it was wandering around the Tide Flats taking photos. Today it's been chill-out time with practicing Czech (the few words I know), a yoga class, errands, and working Lightroom and Photoshop. I printed a couple of the pieces I was working on. This one I printed on a Pictorico Unryu paper (it has beautiful threads running through it). I cropped it and split-toned it. I really like how it looks like a drawing.:

Ducks in the muck

This next image is the bigger piece I worked on that includes the above image. Didn't like how it printed on a fiber paper so I'll have to try it again with different ICC settings perhaps.

Ocean triptych

It's so beautiful right now - I'm an idiot for being inside. I need to get my outdoor clothes on and work in the garden while I have the chance.

Digital collage

Today I found myself working on a digital collage, which is something I haven't done in a long time (probably not since I stopped teaching Photoshop classes). I had an idea of what it was going to be about but realized at the end that it was something I hadn't planned.

My mother-in-law died on Saturday morning at the age of 86. She was the last of her eight siblings left alive after her older sister died two months ago. It's a sad time because Doris is gone but also because it signifies the end of an entire generation of that side of my husband's family.

The collage I made expresses the idea of releasing one's hold on life and moving away from the world, our friends and families, and our identities. As I was making the piece, I started thinking about the Passenger Pigeon and its extinction. I found a newspaper article written by James Audubon about the abundance of the bird. The text that is in the background is that newspaper article. I hadn't connected all these ideas to Doris until I finished the collage and was pondering it. Strange what your subconscious will express when you're not paying attention.

Freedom flight

Stitch function on the Canon G9

I took a bike ride through the Tacoma tide flats with my G9 the other day and decided to test out the stitch function on the camera. I didn't spend any time in post working on the images beyond stitching them into a panorama in Photoshop. If you look at the telephone wires, you'll see some flaws. I was more interested in seeing what I could do quickly and I'm pretty pleased with the results. The final file size, after flattening and compressing as a TIF, was about 190 MB so this is a bit of a space hog. However, it was made out of 5 images so it's not really surprising the file would be so large in size.

Building in the Tacoma Tide Flats - late day

The light was great and the subject matter is just so appealing.