Lost Aussie on the loose

One Inch or Two? And Other Flash Ramblings..

A little sad to say but the blog report is RAIN, RAIN and more RAIN!..... I am figuring on pumping out the winter covered swimming pool soon!  Blech!

Fortunately (I suppose) the crappy weather has meant time for indoor experiments.  Some more or less successful attempts at transfers onto Brass Metal (no the DASS supersauce does NOT work), my old tried and true formula for ink jet transfer with water DOES work and when all else fails, grab the Golden Grounds for Non Porous surfaces and just print on the darned metal itself!

Then tonight I bought a whiz bang new template for my website only to discover that I need to educate myself in all manner of things to do with FLASH!  And OK, Yeah well I have it installed as part of my Creative Suite, but............it's all Greek to me!
Another thing to master on the run and squeeze into the ever burgeoning head!

Do you ever wonder how many more new things we can squeeze into our brains?  My Grandmother mastered driving, and the typewriter.  My Mother has just mastered email and Google and owns and iPod, but if you ask her to change the settings on any of the aforementioned items she just about has a conniption.

I can remember the first computer I had, its 6inch square floppy disks and booting the machine from a DOS promt! C/:
It played Lounge Suite Larry and I had to create my own dBase3 files (from scratch).

Now I am expected to Outlook Express, SMTP, URL, Cache, PDF, Tiff, Jpeg and RAW not to mention, Mpeg3, SWF, Vimeo and YouTube with Google, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator not to forget the windows open with Flickr, Facebook, FFFar out WHo Knows what else?

I do worry about the nooks and crannies in my head...is there room for anything more? and when does it get filled up?  Or is this all just a cure all for Alzheimers?

Stay tuned as I learn life the *FLA way!

Would Have, Could Have...

....if it had been 10 or so degrees warmer I would be outside planting some new rose bushes today. Sadly its COLD COLD COLD (again) and so the task will have to wait until next week I think.

I've had to settle for a little 'virtual' gardening - processing some photos of my Mother's roses that I took on my last trip back to Oz!  Mum's rose garden is awesome!

Through Windows

Glass
Words of  a poem

should be glass
But glass so simple-subtle its shape
Is nothing but the shape of what it holds.

A glass spun for itself is empty,
Brittle, at best Venetian trinket.
Embossed glass hides the poem of its absence.

Words should be looked through, should be windows.
The best word were invisible.
The poem is the thing the poet

thinks.

If the impossible were not,
And if the glass, only the glass,
Could be removed, the poem would remain.

Robert Francis

I love this poem and thought it married well with the digital image I created using photographs of windows that I took whilst in Las Vegas.

Attacking the To Do List

My "To Do" List seems to have a mind of it's own...never ending and always something MORE to add...

I dunno, I guess that's the way they are meant to be!

After more months than I would care to guess at, today I finally finished the re-work of my friend Elaine's wedding pictures.


 She had a professional shoot the original images, but he sent her the files "Straight out of the Camera", without so much as a color balance or crop,  so I have had much joy and pleasure in giving her pics the 'Wedding Treatment'!
I've now burned all the re-vamped pics to a couple of CD's and then done the artsy fartsy thing to a slew of the images and ordered her a Photo Book which hopefully will arrive in a few days time for me to send down to her.

Otherwise, I am tinkering around.  Been experimenting on a bunch of new substrates for mixed media printing, including some new wood veneers, balsa and Plexiglas. 

No joke, once the sun comes out, my mind stars racing at a bazillion miles an hour!!

Sewing It UP

There's no doubt that the appearance of sunshine and temperatures above the 50's improve my mood, as well as my creative MOJO!

I spent today in the company of my trusty fabric shears and sewing machine, whipping up a couple of totes.  The first was pieced together using store bought fabrics (part of the massive stash in the basement that DH does his best to ignore)!  The second was a little more a little more of a creative escapade and came about as I was tidying up bits pieces strewn all over the floor.  Among them were snips of denim and the AHA light bulb went on, and I figured piecing the denim bits together might make for an interesting look........... ergo the re-cycled jean tote was born!
I liked the challenge of collaging? fabric from different chopped up pieces to create the whole, including using the bib tabs, various pockets and different denims.

I've put them both for sale in my ETSY STORE if you are interested in owning a one of a kind creation!
EDIT: The Recycled Journal Bag is SOLD - thank you :-)

Oh How I Love Sunshine!

After days and days of dreary wet rain, flooding, erosion and a dullness outside that just makes you just want to hunker down under a quilt and watch TV re-runs or SLEEP..............

the SUN has finally come out!  

I haven't felt this ALIVE in a long time!!

So what to do when it's so sunny (and relatively warm)? ........Why get out into the garden of course!!  I've spent a productive 4 or 5 hours pulling, pruning, digging, transplanting and generally getting happy and dirty!
Max decided it was PURRR..FECT weather for a little sunbathing session!


and in between raking and pruning, I found enough enough lovely light to satisfy the camera!
(The daffs are store bought, but the sunshine is straight from God!)

Oh yes........... I do LOVE sunshine!

ICE - over and out

Well they are done! 13 lovely 8x10 collages are winging their way to New Zealand!  I just hope the "postie" has his running shoes on and gets them there in a hurry!
  
I've put the finished pieces into a Photo Album in the sidebar if you are interested in having a look.

I'm hoping that the coming week sees a cessation in the rain and would it be too much to hope for a little sunshine?  Even though my "To Do List" offers plenty of opportunities for hiding out indoors, I'd LOVE to get outside for a bit and enjoy some fresh air without coming back in looking like a drenched cat (of which we have plenty!)!!!!

My Version of Art Journaling

I don't really keep and Art Journal as such, but I do have an extensive collection of digital doodles and drawings that I concoct (and rarely show), cos well they are either private or I don't like them so much, but I had fun with this one and thought I would share....

So I came across this cute manga picture via Teesha Moore's blog today and decided that the image would make a fun jump off for a digital sketch.  And yes, if you want, you can call it a rip-off but no worse than Shepard Fairey!

The boon for me is that I am learning to PAINT in Photoshop - using a variety of custom brushes, playing with layer and opacity....and this is in CS4 (not the beta CS5)
You can do it Elements too...all it is is layers, layers and more layers, a little mask here and there and a judicious amount of blending and well.........inspiration!

Personally I like the grungy girl better than the original photo...but I guess that's the whole idea, re-interpreting, re-inventing until you make something your own...with your own message!

New Work

I've nearly completed my 13 collages for the next ICE exchange. A little behind the 8'ball but with any luck they should be all wrapped up and in the mail tomorrow.

This year, as with last, there will be a mixture of straight digital collages, digital collages printed onto mixed media substrates and then a few  of the 'traditional' torn paper goop and glue kind.  When they are all done I'll stick them in a folder in the sidebar for you to take a sticky beak at.

It's been nice to stretch the artistic brain at both ends of the spectrum (pixels to paint).  I've been so caught up in Podcast/Video and Publication technology these past few weeks I had forgotten how much pleasure I get from just getting in the zone and 'creating' ART!

** Windswept & Light have been created using my own photos manipulated in photoshop - with the happy addition of some homegrown coffee cup stains and scans of odds and sods.
"Windswept" has been printed on some textured upholstery material that I found at a non profit recycling center.
"Light" has been printed on some intriguing materials that I found at the local hardware store in the sheet rock department!

ciao for now.....

A Little of This and That

Today's been a mixture of success and major frustration.  In preparation for my "looming" workshops, I have been busy creating video tutorials to supplement the class work.  What was supposed to be an OH so fancy plug-in for Elements (no I won't even bother to tell you what it was) turned out to be a major PITA and resulted in many hours of install, uninstall, reboot and reboot some more and - tear out the very graying hair!

I absolutely adore the opportunities that PC's offer in the way of open source code, but sometimes I just grow more and more in love with my MAC and the fact that it never hiccups, no matter what I try to do to it and that every plug-in that is supposed to work on a MAC does just that!!

Anyway, time, patience and lots of cups of tea later we are all sweet.  I have just decided to work the tutorials without the plug-in and well, maybe folk will just have a better idea of what to do!

In the meantime I have been working on my ICE-11 Collages.........hard to believe it's that time of year again.  True to form there will be a mixture of digital/goop and glue collages that will be sent off.

The first image shows the custom mask used to create a mosaic effect on a graffiti piece that has been printed on a mixed media substrate.

The second set of images tell the story of how you can take an interesting piece of line art (courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons) and transform it into a background and from there, colourize, embellish, paint/enhance and print as a textural collage piece.

Oh and in other NEWS..............I have been selected as one of the FIRST BETA testers of the very hush hush Adobe Photoshop CS5.  As I've had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, there's not much that I will be able to tell you about the whole process, other than I am very excited and thrilled to be among a very select few throughout the world who are getting to trial this new software and work with Adobe to make sure it's just as awesome as we would all wish!  (I'm quite tickled, cant you tell???)