Coloring Vintage Images, pt 2 and Some Digital Collage

A while ago I posted a little boy dressed as a clown from a vintage image. I had a link in that post to the tutorial I used to color him. And I discovered today that link doesn't work - could not find that tutorial again. It's OK - I managed to  figure out how it worked as well as learning an entirely new method from a different tutorial. I will be using the best features of two entirely different methods until I come across a better way.

In this digital collage, I've colored the main figure and put the rest of it together using three purchased digital sets, Variete and Variete Papers from Itkupilli at Deviant Scrap and Turning Leaf Apothecary from Lorie Davison at Scrapbook Graphics. I'm pleased that I finally quite griping about digital sets and gave them a try. I adore the imagination and skill of these two designers and I'm very happy to be learning how to participate in the process as well.

It took me several days to color Lillian and unfortunately I managed to flatten her without a backward glance. So I probably won't be doing it again in order to be able to change her various colors. I have quite a few circus-y type images I'm anxious to try out my new skills on - onward and upward - hopefully!

Thanks for visiting!!

Halloween Witches and Creepiness

I've mostly been working on some figures, polymer clay and Paperclay, during my spare October time, but I haven't managed to finish even one of those. I did get inspired to finish a Halloween page in my "Teesha" journal, a really creepy digital collage and a digitally colored Sweetpea witch. So just a little while before the witching hour of Halloween, I'm going to share those.

 I didn't know any "witch" nursery rhymes for my "Teesha" journal but found several really cute ones online searching on "witch nursery rhymes". She's a little different than the rest of the pages in that I left her BJD eyes. Her dress is from Raphael Tuck's Antique Paper Dolls, a book I've had for ages; Dover, I think. The pumpkin stamp at the bottom is from Queen Kat.

I've been working on this one for quite a while. All I knew I wanted to use was the photo Pam took at the Ohio Reformatory in Mansfield. I did an image adjustment on it to make it blue, took most of the glass out of the windows and added the moonscape. The girl, an online find, was standing in water which I turned to blood. Skeletons are a must for creepiness - I think these are from Flickr Commons. The Bleeding Hearts, flowers and otherwise, came from my desire for a creep factor.

This sweet little witch is a Sweetpea image. I've bought a ton of their witches and used only a few so I was quite happy using this one for some Halloween cards.

Thanks for visiting! 

Loving Photoshop Tutorials

I learn a lot from online Photoshop tutorials. My favorite kinds are the ones that don't include video as I frequently need to recheck the steps which is so much easier in a textbook format.
Well, I bought my third or fourth copy of Somerset Digital Studio recently and instead of getting bent out of shape that all of the lovely layouts were made from digital kits, I decided to go look at some of the digital kits. Being a bit of a slow learner I have a hard time jumping on a new bandwagon. Well, the kits are amazing and lots of brilliant designers have created so many papers and elements and clipping masks (still have to find a tutorial for what those are) that it's tempting to spend my year's craft allowance on the kits. And I will buy some but I also recognize when clip art has been artfully manipulated and I wanted to learn how to do that.
I fiddled around for a day or two using my digital coloring skills and getting nowhere and then I decided to look up a tutorial for coloring old photos. I read several but here's the one I liked the best: {Sorry that was a very bad link} . And here's what I did with it:

It's slick as can be and the really cool part is that I can go back into the unflattened file and change any or all of the different colors I used for a different look. And the selections are already saved because I used layer masks to add the color.

Smeared and Smudged Challenges

Smeared and Smudged is a forum that my friend Pam introduced me to. I know, I know, don't end a sentence with a preposition but sometimes it's just impossible to back out of! Anyway, they foster the alternative stampers - the ones who love vampires and Steampunk and zombies and gore and Halloween every day of the year. And they are the nicest, most nurturing folks! They also have a challenge blog Smudgy Antics and a shop Smeared Ink. I haven't gone hogwild participating other than doing their yearly 31 Days of Halloween in 2011 and 2012. But the past few weeks I've played along with a few of their monthly challenges.

For the first piece the challenge was to interpret a video called You Da One by Rihanna. The particular challenge is called the Rock and Rolla Challenge and features a video to use as inspiration once a month. I love taking really old art pieces like this Titian "Venus of Urbino" and playing with them digitally so this was so much fun! The video wasn't anything I've heard or seen before but I find myself humming and bouncing to it all the time now!

The challenge for the second piece was from their Guest Designer for February, Leigh Snaith-Brunton and basically anything Alice worked. I had been working on these (mostly) Rick St. Dennis images for a couple of weeks with this in mind. The last piece of the puzzle was Rick's Dormouse that I had requested from him. So in the end this came together very nicely. I will be printing it out to put into my over-sized Alice altered board book. That's my woods in the background with a couple of stamped trees to integrate it with the foreground. Another of my favorite techniques!!

The Incredible Fairy Queen Palace

I'm quite a bit behind here on my blog so I'm going to do several posts today. As I said in the title, this is one incredible digital stamp that Rick St. Dennis has in his Etsy stop here . I had so much fun making up stories for each wing of the lovely palace that was constructed with stardust and magic in an old gnarly tree. I intend to do a lot more with this, adding all sorts of naughty and nice fairies to reside here but currently the only occupant is Rick's Dormouse .

The background I've used is a sunrise shot off the deck of our house in Washington with some color variations applied to turn it into dusk. I adore fairytales and fantasy and in my mind this couldn't be more magical!

Day 21 of the 31 Days of Halloween

A while back I peeked into the Vent to find a discussion going on about "Tilda" stamps. As I've said before, my whole career was built on "cute" so I try to avoid it now. Alex expressed a strong distaste for them as well as for clowns and porcelain dolls. So this digital collage is called Alex's Nightmare" and came to me as a result of that discussion.

There are stamps in there - the skull on the piper's face from 100 Proof Press and the rats from Artful Impressions.   From the internet I got the book form (My Journal), the dreamy background (Sol Stock on Deviantart), the piper ( University of South Florida literary files) and the many images of Joan Walsh Anglund's Halloween children. They are my generation's "mouthless" kids since I didn't want to actually buy any "Tilda " stamps. I have one book by Ms. Anglund but they are Christmas rather than Halloween kids. That's my clown doll (vinyl, not porcelain) made by kish & company  to resemble the Picasso clown in the print. There are lots of filters on everything. The Hamelin buildings are a font called Cityscapes. As I was finishing up, my dear husband asked if Alex liked rats and I said, "Oh, dear, I hope not. That would ruin every thing!".

Please use the blogroll on the right side of the page to continue on the hop- Lisa is next- or start at the beginning by using the link to Terra's blog.There are wondrous things to behold! Thanks for the encouraging comments that you've left here for me. I do enjoy them so much!!

Decidedly Alice Deconstructed

Golly, gee, after I just thought I knew how to get my pictures loaded so they went from the front of the book to the end, they're all assbackwards.
Oh well!! I've been altering this book for at least 10 years. The two photos next to last in this post were done so long ago I don't really even remember when and I've wanted to finish it up for quite a while but couldn't find the motivation.
The tunnel in those first two page spreads encompasses maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the pages. Not excellent planning but I did manage to squeeze in the rest of the page spreads I wanted. Using the original Tenniel illustrations throughout, I had a bunch of fun coming up with the backgrounds. The quilt on the rabbit hole page is one I made. The Cheshire cat page is mostly stretched out from the original illustration with some stamps and some Zentangles in the background. The woods for the Tea Party are my woods with a few stamped trees to blend with the party. That's one of my favorite techniques: use actual photos plus stamps. I did a basic pop-up on that page to keep the table out of the fold and then used a bit more complicated pop-up for the Pack of Cards page.

All in all, I'm super pleased with the outcome and thrilled to have finished my first altered book

Doorways - First Try

This was my first go at the Doorways challenge Kate and I are doing. It's such a great theme with so many ways to go. No pun attended! I did this long enough ago that I don't recall if I had any learning breakthroughs while I was doing it. But while I was trying to explain layer masks to Kate over the phone, I realized how they get used with adjustment layers. I didn't go back and change this collage because I liked how grungy it turned out, but I'll definitely use that knowledge in the future. The grunginess occurs when an adjustment layer filters down and effects lower layers that you had no intention of effecting.

Kate keeps saying that she will just finish up and post her projects as if there were gobs more to do to them but her doorways collage here: http://katemarkey.blogspot.com/

seems just perfect to me.

The Very Dark Side of Steampunk

This is my entry for the Dark Side of Steampunk challenge at Smudgy Antics.
As I was turning over in my mind what I considered the dark side of Steampunk, I was coming up with parallels between Victorian times and some aspects of contemporary life: now the child labor laws are being bandied about in US politics, the pollution is from fracking in addition to coal burning, state supported mental institutions were closed en masse in the seventies and eighties. Okay, maybe a little too dark, until I read in the paper they are going to starting a fracking well about 6 miles up the road. So this isn't nearly dark enough!!


Even the whimsical drawing (Digital Things on Etsy) by Alfred Robida from 1883 showing his vision of the future on steam portrays plenty of pollution. Prostitute #1 and crying girl with dog are from 100 Proof Press, charitable child is ALA Art, architectural drawing is from Artful Illusions, the rest of the figures are from Dover clip art books. The quote I found online.


So....is this too dark or not dark enough??

31 Days of Halloween - Day 8

Flowers, y'all!! I said I would do it!

Today's offering is a digital collage I've been working on for months, off and on, but it had been shuffled to the back burner. I started another project yesterday that I was loving but couldn't seem to finish. So I hauled this out, added the ghost stamp from Third Coast so it could qualify to be here and put a little story to it (and the flowers, of course).

Except for the girls and the ghost and the little snippet of lace, all of the layers of the collage were photos I have taken. The foggy morning background is our back field, house taken on a walking tour of Paducah, KY, flowers and spider web from a previous garden. I consider the spider web to be the most awesome layer as it took some real fiddling around to isolate it.

Lots of wonderful posts yesterday and hopefully everybody will get rested up over the weekend although for those of you with children and/or jobs, there may be more to do on weekends than other days. Being retired, the days are all pretty much the same - only the work changes. Today we're cutting wood and splitting it for the woodburner in my studio.

Valentine Theme

I had wanted to work around a valentine/romance theme with the red background I had collaged last week and a close up picture of tango dancers from an '08 calendar. I ran into several problems: the dancers were too big for the page and didn't match the tones of the background, the background itself was too big for some of the other couple images I had on file, and the couple images I wanted to use were a strange assortment of sizes. So I fell back to scanning the images and doing the whole thing digitally. As much as I enjoy getting my hands dirty with paint and glue, I get really excited about being able to alter the size, transluncency, and color nuances of the images I'm working with. In other words, I'm a total Photoshop control freak.

I got a real bonus when I opened the "Stitch" set of brushes by boyingopaw that I had downloaded from here: http://www.brusheezy.com/brushes and saw that the stitiches follow your cursor as if you were really embroidering. Now if I could only sew and cut out and wear paper clothes!

The other bonus was the amazing Virginia Woolf quote I found online: "I want the concentration & the romance, & the words all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose."

The Fool and I

This is another tarot sized image. I started with a photo of a road and one of the sky. After I put in the doorway, it got a little Oz-like, so I added the castle. I thought, "What's a fake tarot card without a Fool?" and I made him the guardian of the gate. At that point I was getting feelings of being trapped inside the picture so I added the pouty girl and her little dog to express those feelings.

Queen of the Night

Interest in vampires comes and goes and usually I am completely unaware of the cycles. I read a lot of Anne Rice in the 80's, boring my teenage boys with "discussions" of how she integrated world history into vampire legend, but then a particularly gory movie with Nicholas Cage and the seeming endlessness of it all made me lose interest. This year, I started watching "Moonlight" and learned about the manga/goth?? inspired ball jointed dolls which somehow I had totally missed.

So when I started working on this amazing blue night shot I got a couple of weeks ago from the back deck, I put in some architecture, a fashion shot and one of those bjd heads and suddenly she was the Queen of the Night. Since those are also one of my favorite tulips, I had to get those in there too. The atmosphere is from duplicating each layer, appying a stamp filter and changing the mode to multiply to get rid of the white.

A Book Round Robin

For the last seven or eight months, a group brought together by Kate Markey, my sister, has been working on a book round robin. In early October, I went to Davis, CA to celebrate the end of the project and to look at what the six of us had accomplished. Each participant chose a theme, created or readied a book form, worked the first pages, and then sent the book along to have each of the other people add their magic. The skill sets and styles were wide and deep, and the finished books were truly wonderful. This post shows what I sent out and what I got back.

My theme was Fairy Tales Real or Imagined. I used a largish board book, stripped the glossy part of the pages off, and lightly gessoed the pages. My cover and spread were done as digital collages in Photoshop, with stamped and photographic images. At times I used real images laid over the stamped images to create depth. These are the print files because I couldn't deal with the glossiness of the printed pages. The spread was a tunnel with four layers.

Autumn's Two Pages

Autumn Labbe-Renault does it all. She makes papers, she stamps, she collages. And now she can say that she has done scenic stamping. She did a lovely job. Here's lots more of Autumn's work.

Stacy's Spread

I didn't get to meet Stacy Goldenberg and I would have liked to. I enjoyed her attention to detail and the composition of her pages. I really liked her book form which was a "Pooh" book disassembled and immaculately reassembled in an accordion structure.

Deatra's Painting

What can I say? Deatra Cohen's painting (in this and all of the other books) is so imaginative and so accomplished. She brought along other books she has written and illustrated and they were all equally witty and charming.

Cheryl's Collages

Cheryl Lundstrom created two more of her amazing collages for my "Fairy Tales..." book. After our brunch, Cheryl talked Kate and I through her free association method. We spent several hours tearing images out of magazines and calendars that just appealed to us and later each of us put a collage together. More on that later.

Kate's Story

Kate Markey, my sister, stamped her images, scanned them into Photoshop, and then told her version of "Once upon a time..." which included a busy but very hip fairy godmother.