Repeat Patterns, Playing with Pen and Ink

Some of the trees around me are starting to change color and loosing some of their leaves. We have had a fairly dry summer and I expect the trees are stressed so dropping leaves early would help them conserve energy and water. Anyway, I picked up one of these yellowing leaves on one of my walks to the Library. I believe the leaf is from a Eastern Cottonwood tree. I recognized the shape as being one I remember from my childhood in Illinois. There was a tree I and my friends spent a summer climbing, as I recall we were playing ship at sea, and the tree stood in for not only the ship but one of the masts, anyway it had the same type of leaves so must have been a cottonwood. 

I used the leaf I picked up as the basis of the above pen and ink work, tracing around the leaf with a technical pen 5 times and then using various fills to create tone and texture. Done in one of my sketchbooks. 

I seem to be into repeat patterns this week, I suppose not a total surprise since I have been working on the Mandala and that requires repeated patterns. The problem is how to get variety within the repeats. For the work above I sort of wish I had varied the size of the leaf, but I only picked up the one so with what I had at hand (no scanner) I had to work with it alone. 

Last week I made a trip into Boston and stopped at one of the Dick Blick Stores, I was looking for more colored pencils but they didn't have the mfg. I was looking for in open stock so I purchased some different items instead, like replacement pen tips for 2 of my technical pens. The above is a doodle I created when I was making sure the new tips were working properly. Not sure what to call it, and you can see what you want in it. Oh, the tips are working fine and I am having fun playing with them. See the two drawings below.

More doodles with my new tips. These I scanned and pulled into Photoshop for some additional work/play yesterday. The resulting image is below.

Above is my Photoshop creation. It might work for wallpaper or fabric, though I think the background needs more work. Originally it was just plain blue, but I felt that was too boring so I added the green squiggles. Still a bit on the boring side so I may do some more playing around with it and add another darker color to the mix.

I have often thought it might be fun to design fabric, not that anyone would ever ask me to do so. Still it was sort of interesting to play around in Photoshop to see what I still remembered of how to create documents from scanned images.

Last image for today is an update on the Mandala. The final ring has some inking, I finished the pansies and added some toning to that rings background. Now I have to decide what the flowers will be for the final ring. I think it needs some punch/color so we will see.

As a final photograph today, some poppies I found growing just outside the fence in someone's garden. Aren't they a pretty red. They are much smaller then the orange perennials that bloom in spring, but still recognizable as poppies.

That is it for today. Per usual comments are welcome.

A Watercolor, ATC and Graphic Design

Today's update is kind of a hodgepodge. I was in Walmart the other evening and noticed that this local store (we have 2 within about 5 miles, different towns but..) has bolts of fabric again, surprise. Thinking I should check it out I wandered in that direction. Then I got distracted and never even checked out the fabric, not a big deal it is probably poor quality, but will do that on another visit. Anyway the path toward the fabric took me by the art supplies isle and I thought why not check that out first.

The supplies are mostly cheap student grade stuff but for some reason they were doing a close out on pads of paper so had reduced prices on all their Canson pads. I can only guess that they are getting in a new vendor and want to clear out the Canson paper to make shelf space. Anyway the prices were pretty good, paper keeps until I need it so I picked up a couple of pads.

One of the pads I picked up was labeled as Mix Media and is 11 x 14 inches 160gsi or 98lb in weight. I purchased the pad thinking it might be good paper to use to make some more of my own journals. Since I had never purchased this paper before I wanted to check out how acceptable it would be to use with watercolor so I painted the above.

Loose impressions of 2 plants I have in the apt. For the Spathiphyllum (peace lily) on the left I did a bit of inking first. The 2nd on the right is supposed to be some kind of fern and that one I just used the brush for. I did mix a new green and used that along with some other mixed greens that were already on my pallet.

I started keeping a very messy pallet when I belatedly realized that dried watercolor can be reactivated by adding water with no problems unlike gouache which seems to suffer a loss of quality. Now unless I am starting a new project that I will need completely different colors for I don't bother cleaning up the pallet between painting sessions.

Anyway the experiment was a success, the paper accepted the watercolor without excessive buckling so I think it would be a good choice for a blank journal. I wouldn't want to flood the paper with water, don't think it will stand up to that, but a combination of ink and fairly dry watercolor works. The paper has a fair amount of tooth so should also be fairly good with colored pencil. I think I made a good buy.

The two images above are a continuation of my toy theme. The top Teddy Bear is based on the one I did for the last update with the doll, though this guy is on a new ATC (Artist Trading Card). I added the flag (pennant) just to add some color and interest. The rug he is sitting on sort of looks like grass but then I have seen indoor carpets that also mimic grass so it isn't that much of a stretch.

The outlined rocking horse is also going to be a ATC, but the drawing I made was just a bit to large to copy directly over to a card so I scanned this image into Photoshop, shrunk it a bit and reprinted it out. I will use the reduced size image to transfer over to a blank ATC stock. Right now I plan on using colored pencil on this, but who know I may change my mind and make it a watercolor.

The drawing is based on some photographs I found of antique rocking horses, but isn't a copy of any of them as it combines some elements of my plastic(fiberglass?) horse with the antique wooden ones.

Late last fall one of my friends from the old Compuserve Crafts forum days created a new Facebook group for us. But the group needed a header so I spent some time yesterday in Photoshop to pull the above one together. Not totally thrilled with it, but it is better than nothing. I found myself remembering why I don't like the Text tool in Photoshop and am thinking I should really redo this in Illustrator where I would have better control. The quilt blocks are images exported from Corel Draw and my days of drafting quilt block patterns. The font wasn't my first choice, but I guess it works.

Just realized that my graphic design skills are getting a bit rusty. Oh if any readers are interested in joining (it is a closed group) e-mail me and I can give you contact information or an invite.

Last image a photograph of a blooming weeping cherry tree. There are actually a pair of these outside the Catholic Church Rectory that is across the street from the Library. I love weeping cherries, so even though it was raining a bit that day I made this photograph.

That is it for today, per usual comments are always welcome.

Photoshop Trick and couple of drawings

Not much new art today. Every now and then life gets in the way of art and that has been what has been happening to me this past week. So above is a small, and I do mean small pen and ink drawing that I added colored pencil to. Not a lot of color, just some blue and yellow. Done on white Stonehenge, size of the center is approx 4 inches square. No opinions on my part for this one, it was just something I did to give me something to do while my mind was distracted by life.

Above is a drawing from my sketchbook of a Great Blue Heron. I believe this will be the center of the border piece I was working on this spring.

Thank heavens for Photoshop. Since I have scans of both the heron drawing and the finished border I can combine the two  in one file (different layers) and using a layer mask on the scan of the borders show off the drawing in the center of the border as it will be in real life. This allows me to play with the size of the drawing as it shows in the center. See the two images below:

Not sure which size of the Heron I prefer, I think the one on the right. Note that I didn't spend a lot of time cleaning the edges with the brush tool, so you can see some areas of paper from the scan of the border which is on top of the drawing scan. 

For those with Adobe Photoshop who want to know what I did, I opened the file, made a copy of the image so the image is on a layer that can be modified. Then I added a Layer Mask to that layer, I used the reveals all option, then switching the color swatches so that black is on top and active I selected the brush tool and proceeded to wipe out the center of the scan. The drawing scan was then copied over into the border file, placed so that it was underneath the border. Then I played with the size of the drawing image until I liked what I saw.  I hold down the shift key while dragging corners, that way the drawing doesn't get distorted. If I had taken more time with the brush tool I could have had totally smooth edges around the border. In this case I don't really care so didn't bother.  

This is a very quick and useful way of combining and modifying photographs.

One last image today:

I spent some time walking to various locations this past week, and when the day is sunny I always haul the camera long. Above is a photograph of some blooming peonies in a neighbors yard. I love the sight and smell of blooming Peonies, we had them in our yard when I was a kid. Don't love the ants that also love them for their sweet sap, but the flowers are beautiful. I think this pink and white combination is esp. lovely.

That is it for today. Per usual comments are always welcome.

Photoshop Tips - Watermark a Photo

No art work this week to show, but in my Photography class we were going over lighting specifically for portraits, and in Photoshop how to add a copyright notice to photographs. Above is a photo that I have added copyright information to using Photoshop. It is really fairly easy to do, I would say almost the hardest part is getting the copyright symbol to show. I have CS3 at home and we were using CS4 at school, I am fairly sure the tip will work with older versions and maybe Elements as well, but I don't have access to those versions so I don't know for sure.

To add what looks like a watermark to a photo, you first open the photo in Photoshop. Then you select the Type tool and change your tool selection to the Type MASK tool, I use horizontal type as vertical type is usually really stupid looking and something I have been trained to avoid in Graphic Design. Select your font and font size (I used 200 for the image above) Click on your picture where you want to put the copyright information, for those who haven't used the Type Mask tool before it is OK that the layer turns red, just go ahead and type where the flashing curser shows up. First you want to create the © symbol. I have listed the various methods for Windows OS below, for Mac's I think it is Command g not sure what the Tradmark and Registered symbol shortcuts are on a Mac, sorry.

          Windows Keyboard Shortcuts:

                 Copyright symbol = Alt 0169
                 Trademark = Alt 0153
                 Registered  = Alt 0174
          HTML
                 ©  "&#0169"
                 ™ "&#0153"
                 ® "&#0174" 
                 Note: for HTML coding leave out the quote marks.

So to get the copyright symbol on a PC in Photoshop press down the ALT key and type in 0169 on the keypad (make sure num lock is on) . Then type the rest of your copyright information, usually your name and the year.  When you are finished press the check mark that is in the upper right hand menu bar, it is the Commit Edits selection. Now you should have your text outlined in what is referred to as marching ants, because that is sort of what it looks like. Next you want to copy this selection to a new layer, do that by using the menu option LAYER - NEW - LAYER VIA COPY (or Ctl J). Don't worry I know it looks like your text just disappeared but it hasn't. In the layers panel you should now see a new layer and it should be automatically selected. In the lower left area of the layers panel there should be a fx symbol (doesn't look exactly like the text) this is for attributes that you can apply to layers, click on it and a box will come up listing various options, select Bevel and Emboss. Just by selecting this you should now be able to see the text you typed on your Photograph. You can change the various sliders to make the text more obvious if you want. When you are finished just click OK and you are done. Now you can save the file, I usually just use save for web and then cancel any changes to my original photo but you can also save the photo as a copy or before you started making changes to your image you could have copied the background to a new layer and made the changes there. The JPG file format is called Lossy because it is a compressed file. Every time you save the file after changes you loose some information because of the compression. So I try to keep my original photos without any changes and if I make changes to a photo I just save that under a new name using SAVE AS. Do what works for you. So now you know how to create a watermark in Photoshop.

These last two images are the same photo, we were doing studies using light, and I took a photo of this doll with back lighting. Notice how dark her face is since I didn't use the flash. If I were photographing a person I would be using a reflector to the front or side to lighten their face but it can also be done to a certain degree by using Photoshop. All I did to the 2nd image was open the original in Photoshop then selected the following menu option - IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - SHADOW/HIGHLIGHT... The photo automatically lightened because of the presets, but you can also use the sliders to do additional adjusting. If you like the results you can press OK, otherwise use the cancel button. I think this option is very cool, and can be very useful exp. for photos like the one on the left above.

That is it for this post. I could have talked a bit about what I learned about lighting people for portraits but I think I will save that for another day. Hopefully for my next post I will have some art work to show. In the meantime comments are welcome.

Veggie Head

Just a short post today, I am busy trying to work on my homework for Graphic Design, and at this point see no way I am going to have it all done by Monday (sigh) Maybe if I hadn't taken any time off, but hey it is Spring BREAK - I felt I deserved a bit of a break. Anyway one bit of homework I did finish was the Veggie portrait above. This was homework for my Photography class, all shapes are vegetables that I then used the various select tools in Photoshop to crop out of the photos they were in. Hair is garlic chives, ears are fava beans, mouth is made up from a hot pepper, the whites of the eyes are white radishes, the pupils are blueberries, the nose is a squash, the eyebrows are snap peas and last but not least the face is a blue/white pumpkin. Isn't it cute? Well I think it is.  I didn't do any photo-editing other than being selective about what I selected.

Tomorrow I will be taking the school sponsored trip to NYC to visit either galleries and museums or just museums. Probably the latter, modern shock art doesn't really interest me all that much. I don't think I will haul the SLR camera, too large and I don't think the museums or galleries would like me having it. I will take the old Canon, but not sure if I will have any photos from the trip. The weather should be beautiful, sunny, warm, not very March like at all.

I have also been working on a new mandala design. This one has an Egyptian theme, well sort of.

Playing with Photoshop

I think my Photography class is finally going to get serious. So far we have just been more or less reading about important aspects of photography, shutter speed, aperture size, depth of field, focus, and trying to learn about our personal cameras and how those aspects affect our photographs. Next week we have an assignment to photograph textures, and print a contact sheet of about 20 photo's. The following week we will print in a larger format 4 of those photos and create an artist statement to go with them as to what we were trying to show in our images - I may not have what is to be in the statement quite correct but... close. Should be interesting.

So far we have not spent much time learning or using Photoshop, we have opened it up and done some playing around to see what certain features are, but no real work with it. One of the things we were doing was to use Photoshop to create a HDR photo. A HDR photo is a composite image that combines 4 different photo's into one image. It is used in certain lighting situations, such as an interior where the interior is lit but you can't see anything outside the window. The photographer takes (usually) 4 pictures with different exposures see my examples below.

As you can see the first one is overexposed, the 2nd slightly overexposed, the third I would consider a normal exposure, and the last is underexposed. Note in the underexposed image the sky is blue and you can see the tip of a tree out the window. Below is the HDR image as I adjusted it. I am sure that someone with more experience could get a better result, but hopefully you will get the idea of what this technique can do.

This last photo of the jade plant was taken with a flash. Note that there is no detail outside the window and the yellow curtains are very washed out.

 

None of the first four photos used a flash. I had the camera mounted on a tripod so I could have longer exposures without shake. For those with Photoshop who would like to try this the menu options are FILE - AUTOMATE - MERGE TO HDR, you get a screen where you have to select the photos to be merged, it is easier if you have them already open in Photoshop. After Photoshop does the merge, you can make adjustments to the image, when you are happy you can save it.

I have 3 more photos to show, first one is of some trees at what I would consider a normal exposure, the 2nd is a rather overexposed image, but with the snow on the trees I though made an interesting pattern. I brought that photo into Photoshop, did some cropping, then using the Image, Adjustments, Hue and Saturation sliders I changed the colors of the trees, making them green, blue, and a purple. I keep thinking there should be a way for me to use this in a quilt, I know print it on fabric first - but it is what I do with it afterwards that I am still pondering. 

 

Any suggestions will be welcomed. That is it for this post. I Will hopefully have some more drawings next week.