Lost Aussie on the loose

Posting Over At Vision and Verb

 

I'm posting over at Vision and Verb today.  Have a lovely weekend everyone!

Fresh Air

Yesterday it was 56F!!!  Can you believe that?  A day of fresh air not to be missed.  DH and I trotted off to our northern beach park.  The tide was out, plenty of sand to walk on.  Gulls, shells, blue sky and best of all clean fresh air.

Of course beach means camera, camera means pictures and pictures mean more reasons to fiddle with them in Photoshop - right?

Yeah! Of course that's how it goes .....

...... ciao for now!

Lying In Wait

 

Still no word from the Apple Store on the welfare of my laptop.  I'm beginning to wonder if they have it hostage to read the daft emails and peruse the artwork and photos at their leisure.

Is it time to post a snarky Customer Service alert on Facebook in the hopes of having some sort of action?  As it seems that that is the most expedient way of getting any response from anyone these days.

It's one of the rare companies that does nothing to reward loyalty purchasing and heaven knows, we have given them enough money in the last few years, you would think they could be a little less haughty and a lot more accommodating.

Trouble is that I've had this "lappie" for 4 years and saved on anti-virus software, a machine that turns on and does what I want, when I want and aside from having iTunes rule my life, has been as reliable as dirt.

I've no doubt the hostage crisis will endure - in some form or another.

Winter's Chill

Winter has been here for some time but it really only seems real when the snow falls. 
We have 5 inches of fluffy white stuff on the ground and the efforts to clear the garden paths and driveway have left me with the snuffles and a wretched cold.  I can't complain for I usually only garner one cold a year at most and my firm belief in the power of veggies in my diet usually see me relatively "bug" free!

I'm still waiting for Apple to diagnose my laptop computer.  They seem a lot quicker to lift your money for new products than to fix the old and I fear the (anticipated) replacement logic board for my 4 year old laptop will not be a wise choice.  However it will be a strain on the purse strings to shell out for a new machine at this point.

Perhaps a fire sale is in order?  Or perhaps more appropriately, a snow sale?

Get Ready - Action

Sky Dreamer © Marie Otero 2012

I was going to have another ranty post about bad customer service and my 40 minute wait at the Genius Bar today to have my sick (read probably DEAD) laptop taken care of.

Or the crappy technical support and lack of responsiveness from the teachers/assistants in an Online Class I am taking.

In the end, when I sat down to my computer I decided that I couldn't be bothered with all that blah and hopped off to the go-to place for faces, started fiddling with an image which lead me to working on creating a set of PHOTOSHOP PAINTING ACTIONS that I will be offering students in the (slowly evolving) class that is currently on my drawing board.

I mostly make Photoshop Actions to suit myself and my own workflow and this is the first time I have worked on them so they might have a wider application to a variable audience.  So far so good.  And a nice break from writing html code.

Oh and someone asked me what paper I was using to print double sided work for the Sketchbook Project, its Jet Print Photo Matte.  I think it's been discontinued but I bought several reams of it a year or two ago off Ebay and it's just the best.

Portrait Image credit http://charligal-stock.deviantart.com

Html_hell - just a small rant.

So I have this dream ... inside my head ...  a website that I can see and that I am 74.66% done with (yes, that precise, because the .66% is really THAT important!)

It's a website that I have had in my head for several years now but I am frustrated.  Beyond belief.  I am not fond of code.  I can wrap my head around it and have basic html language skills.  I'd love to hand over the task of designing the website to a cleverer person who is skilled in web design but I am loathe to, having being bitten by less than stellar offerings for lots of money in the past.  So I WILL do this one myself.  But OMG it sucks.  One small tweak in one direction sends a flood of instructions to another page.  Save the style and apply it to one page only.  Change the CSS and have it appear madly where it's not wanted.  I'm not sure if this is something you need to do with no wine or lots of it.

It would be OK if I wanted something just ah-hem and easy. But I don't.  That's not the picture inside my head.

I'll be perservering.

Stay tuned.  It's all part of the new big plan.

Photoshop At Work - the Sketchbook Project

I'm finally turning my hand to getting my Sketchbook Project complete.  I did a whole bunch of work in the book towards the end of last year and then decided that I didn't like how it worked, the feel of the paper etc and so in a fit of pique I just tore it all out and decided to start again.

This time I have used heavier paper that will take transfers, cut and paste, collage and double sided digital printing without the paper getting all ruckeley (is that even a word?) and horrid - you know what I mean, where the paper gets wrinkley and bubbley because you have used wet media.  Anyway, I digress.

I've sorted the problem.  I'm using some medium weight digital fineart paper that will tolerate some water (not rain showers) and is amenable to double sided printing.

I've set myself up a handy dandy template in Photoshop that has layers with guides,clipping masks for placing images and instructions for when I am not paying too much attention and will orient the paper correctly depending on which side I am printing.

Thanks to the use of adjustment layers (in Photoshop) I can balance colors on versing pages and get a good match of tones so that there is some continuity and visual appeal.

Not all the pages are digitally printed.  Some have collage or transfers and others cut and paste, tip-in style.

It probably would have helped if I had decided on how many pages the book would have from the get-go, but hey, that would have been just a TAD TOO organised!

There will still be some "winging and wishing on a prayer"!

Since I've paid to have the book digitized you should be able to see it online (eventually!)!!!

Postcard Love

I've been playing with paint (the real stuff) for the last few days as I need to make some mixed media postcards for a Postcard Swap that I have signed up for.

Although I don't have too many painterly skills to boast of, I have lots of fun slapping watercolours, acrylics and inks across a page to make a colourful mess.
Best of all, I know that I can scan said "mess" and create lots of other goodness from my paper based fiddles and leverage them in many ways in Photoshop.  I can also alter the large scanned images endlessly, make new art, create brushes, play with text and well .... you get the idea.

If you are interested in Postcard swapping the sign-ups are open until January 20th!  It's an International Swap so you might get some cool art from some far flung places and the stamps alone will be fun to see.
Click on the Button above to go and check it out.

Snippets of Inspiration

In the last few years my goal has to always use my own imagery in my digital artwork.  A lofty goal no doubt, but not always realistic, as I shoot many pictures, but not so many that include portraits or models which are often a key component in the digital art that I like to make.  So, like many others, I resort to stock imagery to incorporate into my work.

There's a host of places to find good stock but my "go to" place is Deviant Art where the generous and inspired commumity of artists there often have good fodder to peruse. Case in point being the model featured here from THIS artist.

There's always a little "piece of me" in my work, be it a layer of texture, a background shot or some other worthwhile snippet from my camera which is not always visible, and then there is the face, generously derived from another source, reinvented, painted or otherwise manipulated that finds it's way into what I am doing.

My thanks to all those who take the time to share, give and inspire in our digital art world!

You ROCK!!

Trash or Treasure

Click and Mouseover the image for the before and after edits.

I'm probably not the only person who takes masses and masses of photos with my digital camera.  The bigger my memory card gets, the more pictures I take and then of course you have a spare memory card for when the main one gets full .... and then of course there are all the pictures that you can take with your phone too .....
Storage and back up of all these images becomes an issue too ... so where do you stop? What do you throw out?

That for me is a major issue as I can usually find some small point of redemption in even the poorest of shots - even if it's just a photo to be kept as fodder for the shape and texture folder. I have a hard time putting any images in the Re-cycle Bin.

The Red balloon is a good example of something that "nearly" got tossed but then I hummed and hawwed over it some and decided to give it a 2nd chance.  The terrible angle of the initial capture meant that just straightening the photo was not an option.  Enter the handy dandy "Puppet Warp" tool which did a fairly decent job of fixing the bad line of the original.  The balloon is still a bit skew-wiff, but by creating a bi-tonal image and ramping up the focus on the red of the balloon, it's less than perpendicular string becomes less of an issue.

I over sharpened the image a lot (on purpose), so that the reflection in the balloon would show up better.  Added some grain and pumped up the grit factor with a gradient map.

All in all I'm pretty pleased with how the photo turned out and it just goes to show that what so easily could have been "Trash" turned into quite a nice little "Treasure"!

What do you think?  Are you a hoarder or a culler?