flutterby

Look, stirrings of life!

I'm not back, but I can promise some irregular updates now and again.

Here's a little bit of something from my garden - a yellow swallowtail stopped by for a snack on its travels. I was enchanted enough to grab the good camera and try my hand at a photo or two.



Taken with Sony Cybershot DSC-H7, retouched in Adobe Photoshop

day 54: Sky

 

Sky (2007) Digital photograph, retouched and manipulated in Photoshop

days 52 and 53: Foodie Glamour Shots

 

 

(1999) Digital photographs, retouched and digitally manipulated.

Two glamour shots I did for the cookbook project I mentioned on day 9.

One's vegan, and one isn't. I can't recall now which is which.

day 43: Wallflowers

 

Wallflowers (1999) Digital photograph.

Two of the dolls from the ragdoll project (CafeGirl and PonyTart), posed.

Day 31: Gifts of Fortune

 

Gifts of Fortune (2007) Digital photograph, no manipulation. No flash, black and white.

This was meant to be my Illustration Friday entry for last week, but it took me all week to get just the right image. I wanted to do it using traditional photography techniques, or as close as I might be able to come with a digital camera. The theme last week was Fortune, and my feeling about it was to do with the power of family being a profound demonstration of fortune in my life. My second child took four tries, and I consider him a gift - even though both children are treasures, it was much more difficult to achieve that gift the second time, and I had given up trying when we finally got him.

He's my good fortune.

Also, you will note that this is a day late. I took about 4 dozen images last night and only got it posted today. My apologies, today's will be up shortly.

Illustration Friday: Spring

 

Spring (2007) Digital painting, incorporating collage elements from original reference photographs. Photoshop 5, mouse, and digital camera.

I'm leaping into Illustration Friday wholeheartedly, if a little late this week. The theme is green - and I think I captured what I think of when I think of green.

The seedling is a basil seedling in my kitchen garden. I was going for a feeling of deep, bourgeoning greenness and life, as we usually have here in late April or May. I'm thinking I might have got it, though the skies are all early April.

I did all the masking/drawing/painting with my mouse, as my tablet stylus is AWOL (I love moving). I only used a few filters - fresco, high pass, and gaussian blur. All else is done with the basic photo retouching tools, and a couple of brushes. The tree is real, but doesn't look anything like that, the leaves are parsley, made into brushes, and the statice on the ground is the pink-frosted top of my redbud tree, or at least it started that way. The clouds were photographed today -4 photos-, and layered and cloned and smudged around until they were right.

Day 18: Untitled

 

Untitled (2002) Digital photograph, some retouching.

Here's another clear winter day photograph. It's very much a non-religious Chrsitmas card sort of image, but it works. That was a good photography day.

Day 15: Erishkegal

 

Erishkegal (2000) Digital painting, incorporating collaged photographic elements and text.

I was reading a lot of paleohistory and books about Sumerian religous texts. I felt, all along, that Erishkegal (the goddess of the underworld and gaurdian of the dead) kind of got the short end of the stick during the world's creation. She certainly isn't happy in the Songs of Innana, she obviously feels cheated, and is envious of the real life that the love/fertility goddess gets to have.

I wanted to make a portrait of her as the bride of the underworld. This is it.

Day 12: Mousecat

 

MouseCat, 2006 Posed digital photograph of a needle-felted scuplture of a cat. Minor digital cleanup/tweaking.

I made this for my mother and psoed and photographed it on her desk, which is made of a long-ago-gutted pianola. It's a charming little bit of fluff, but some of the photos I took were downright surreal.

Day seven: Winter Solstice

 

Winter Solstice (2002) Digital photograph. Taken with an older Canon digital, most of the framing was done while shooting. Cropped, and slightly altered digitally (saturation and contrast were adjusted).

Sometimes landscape photography is just good. I'm no Ansel Adams, but pictures like this make me significantly less embarrassed to hold a camera in the name of art.

It was a gorgeous winter day at my mom's place, so I took the camera outside and tried to capture some of that magic.

Day three: Poppets, Bouquet

 

Poppets (1999) Digitally manipulated photograph of four posed, armless, faceless, rag dolls. Dolls are cotton and polyfil.



Bouquet (1999) Digitally manipulated photograph of detached, stuffed cotton doll legs, gathered in a box. Legs are cotton and polyfil.

This is something that grew out of my taking documentary photographs of a craft project. I was making a series of character rag dolls from a pattern I designed for the project. While photographing the various steps, I posed the dolls and their parts in various ways, and took photographs that had little to do with the steps involved in making the dolls themselves. There are about 10 photographs in this series, and perhaps 30 of the documentary, instructional series.

Day One: Secret Book

 

Secret Book 1999

This is really two works.

The book is a journal, made of paper, board, cloth, thread, wire, glue and ribbons. After making the journal, I photographed it and digitally altered the photograph. The journal is approximately 5x7 inches, closed, and I think about 60 pages. It is in a private collection, and was intended for use.

The creative process of the book was very intuitive, involving as much "let's see if this will work" as traditional bookbinding techniques. The paper was sewn into signatures, which were then sewn together, and glued to the fabic-covered boards. I chose the spiralled wire decorations for the outer binding, as I enjoy working with wire and I loved the way the stretched spirals evoke Asian depictions of clouds. The ribbons tied along the spine serve the function of the spine of a traditionally bound book, taking some strain off the signature stitching when the book is in use. The third ribbon functions as a latch.

The book is so evocative of dreams, clouds, night, and older votive books that it suggested a certain arcane, occult feeling in the photographs I took, originally to document the physical work. I decided to explore digital manipulations of the photographs to further express that feeling.

This piece is the result.