Collage from Photoshop Class

This Photoshop collage was done a couple of years ago as the final project for a Photoshop class I took at Columbus State Community College. We were required to put an image of ourselves into the work and short of that anything was OK. I used images from magazines, calendars, a tarot deck, a travel book, and an insect field guide. Mostly I think we were demonstrating that we knew how to make a decent selection with various tools. It had upwards of 50 layers and I still remember how much fun it was.

Photoshop Collage

What with painting, packing stuff up to go to storage and being in a general state of confusion about how to move forward with selling this house, I haven't taken time to haul out art supplies to work in my art journals. One night last week I took one of the backgrounds I had made in February, blurred the heck out of it, added grunge with some of my favorite brushes from Vered and Annika von Holt, and then stuck a few photos from my old scanned photo albums in, plus a bird and a bee. It was a fun little quickie!

Two Versions of a Soul Collage

When I do these soul collages I am not trying to be very serious. So Kate suggested the hole in the head words which referenced both alcohol and the background figure and I was working through ideas of fermented brews being as ancient and as cross cultural as the images I had. Also it was fun to try to turn the hand holding the bottle to stone. So I got two for little more than the price of one.

Ken's Clown Book

I knew there was one more thing I had worked on in February but couldn't remember what. This is worked into an altered board book, Clifford, the Big Red Dog, which must have 850 pages I've been at it so long. I saw the Ben Hecht quote on a Facebook group, Art Journaling, and knew I had to use it for a clown spread in Ken's Clown Book. The project is probably six or seven years old with no finish time in view but occasionally I like to pull it out and play with it. It's one of the few things I've ever scanned that I couldn't correct all the color that the scanner added to the stamped work.

Land In Ohio

Well, now that I've opened that can of worms about the possibility of moving back to Ohio, I want to share some books I've been reading. One of them is "Truck" by Michael Perry. Kate recommended it to Ken to read when she was here but after we got it out of the library I got to it first when he started reading the other Michael Perry book, "Population 485." "Truck" is his story about small town life in Wisconsin, about a 1951 (1952?) International Harvester truck, and about love. Kate said she loved his voice and I think I understand what she means: style, vision, center of gravity, etc. but what I loved about the book was his total reverence for every aspect of his life. This is the first nonfiction reading I've done for a while and it was wonderful. My son has also been asking me to read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," so I have started that as well. It is extremely well written and considering that it is basically about the politics of food, specifically corn, I'm amazed at how hard it is to put down.
I'm not going to become a farmer at the age of 65, but these readings make me consider how little trouble the chickens and goats were for the 8 to 14 year olds on "Kid Nation," and how much satisfaction they gave. Ken and I (mostly him) have gardened for quite a few years now; we love our tomatoes and herbs and it isn't such a stretch to imagine expanding a little and starting to preserve food in ways that I have seen my mother do in those few years we lived on a farm.
So Ohio is a least up for consideration, given that land values there are more in range of our retirement income. We shall see what we shall see!

Photoshop Mandala

I've been speaking with an old friend from Ohio who went to check out a small farm in Chillicothe for us and one of her abiding interests is mandalas. She was telling me about a software program that makes mandalas and I told her I thought I could probably do them in Photoshop. For this first try I used a photo of a crystalline mess that was on some glass after a dying experiment. The small pieces of dyed velvet were great but Kate and I were just as excited by these photos of crystals. This mandala is eight sectioned because eight seemed so easy but I think twelve sections would maybe be more interesting. My friend, Jean, is printing them out to quilt with.