Talisman Tree: number five

Did you think that I'd forget this week's Talisman Tree? Nope. I seem to be on a creative roll with other projects but the talisman trees are always works-in-progress as well; I wouldn't neglect Talisman Tree Tuesday!

This week's Talisman Tree features the silhouette of a tree I photographed in Kentucky, on our journey home last month. I thought I had it finished last night but, wouldn't you know, I tweaked the sky colours again this morning. Then, after I posted it, I ended up deleting it so I could play with it again. Sometimes ... sigh ... I'm just never satisfied.

Monday morning experiments

No long, wordy post today. I can hear your sigh of relief; don't worry, I know I can sometimes ramble on and on and on........

Today, I just want to share some of my photoshop experiments with you. I made another purchase over the weekend from one of my favourite online retailers, DesignerDigitals, and have been playing with what I bought: textures, templates, overlays, edges and frames and more. Lots of fun; my creative juices are flowing!

Above, the triptych features a flower pot I photographed in Toronto's distillery district, the statue is from the historic cemetery in downtown Richmond, KY, and of course, you see dear, sweet Terra. I particularly like the texture I used on her photo; it gives the image such a classic, vintage appearance. I think it's lovely.

Art Creations Friday

I enjoy participating in the various online art challenges, but I do admit I'm not a regular player at any of them. When the themes don't resonate with me, I just skip them. But all of the challenges in which I do participate require me to create a piece of art based on a theme, so I was pleased to discover Art Creations Friday and its lack of a theme. Instead, a picture or background is posted and you must create your piece of art using that particular image. Other than that rule, anything goes.

I do not normally do this -- I work with my own original images, although I certainly do take advantage of the numerous free textures and edges widely available online. Those enhance my own creations though, I don't base a piece of art on them.

Still, I am constantly trying to test my self-imposed limitations and spread my wings, making this an excellent design challenge: instead of working with something of my choice -- my typical approach -- this weekly challenge made me step outside of my comfort zone and take something I wouldn't normally create art with, and make it work.

The vintage photograph of the woman with the rifle is this week's image and, at first, I was dumbfounded. Honestly....she's interesting for sure, but definitely not my cup of tea. But I like a challenge and didn't want to give up. I fiddled around, tossing out several ideas, and came up with something that I like, something that made me smile.

This "assignment" turned out to be an excellent learning experience, one I highly recommend. Stepping away from the tried-and-true is something I think we should all force ourselves to do; it's how we grow.

I can't promise to be a regular Art Creations participant, but I do look forward to seeing what's posted there next week!

Picton's Regent

I'm a blogging machine today! It's rare that I post twice in one day, but Fridays feature both Illustration Friday and Photo Friday. Since I have something for both -- see my previous post for my Photo Friday contribution -- it's a double-post day.

The theme at Illustration Friday is "theater" (or theatre, if you're Canadian) and I immediately thought of the numerous photographs I've taken over the years of vintage theatre signs. I was going to make a collage with several of them but got taken up with altering a photograph I took in Picton (a charming town about 90 minutes east of Toronto) and I never got around to any of the others. Some other time, some other challenge.

Brown is a colour too

This is just so funny. In my last post, I rambled on about colour -- and I even said, in no uncertain terms, that I don't live in a sepia world. So, what's the theme over at Photo Friday today? Brown. Aargh!

But to be fair, brown is a colour. Wood is brown, chocolate and coffee -- two of my favourite things -- are brown, tree bark can be brown, I even own a brown sweater. So I had a look at my recent photographs and this one (which I took during the outing I described in my last post) caught my eye. The brown "tree" you see in the centre is a light fixture; pretty cool, eh? A smaller version would look great in my living room.

You'll notice the guy on the left; I don't know if he's taking a picture of the young fellow taking a photograph, or is perhaps focused on something else. I like to think he's photographing the young fellow using the DSLR (I was impressed he's using a manual focus). And the young guy with the white baseball cap? I swear he's posing with a knife in his right hand. I didn't notice it at the time -- I was just amusing myself taking pictures of people taking pictures -- but I've zoomed in on my hi-res original, and it sure looks like a knife to me.

Life in the big smoke................

Colour can make me crazy

I thrive on colour, couldn’t live without it. Red is my fave, followed closely by purple and pink -- and always with black and white and grey thrown in as well. My purse is hot pink, so are my maryjane crocs. I have a beloved collection of Le Creuset pots and bakeware in shades of orange and yellow and red, even blue and white and a bit of green. I have cherry red bath towels along with bright yellow. You get the picture. I don’t live in a sepia world.

But when it comes to the trifecta of computers, cameras and processing, colour starts to drive me crazy. It goes like this: I take a photograph, upload it onto my laptop, and it looks good. I do a bit of colour correction in photoshop. It looks better. I may post it online -- either here on my blog or perhaps in my image galleries. I like how it looks. I go online with the captain’s laptop to have a peek, where it looks just fine too. He reassures me it looks the same on his computer at work.

So far, so good. But if I check out my blog on a friend’s computer, I don't always like what I see. While my photographs here on this blog often do look the same on different computers than my own, it is dispiriting to occasionally see that the colours look quite different on someone else's computer. Realistically I know there is a big difference in monitors and their colour profiles -- and I know I don’t have any control over any monitor but my own -- but it’s still frustrating that others might not see what I see.

Colour printers can also be problematic, but the frustration reaches a peak for me when I get photographs developed. I mostly get my photos processed at Black’s, a Canada-wide chain with so many locations that I’m sure you know where to find your local store. It’s so easy to upload my photos at their web site and then pick them up at my convenience. But on many occasions I’ve felt my pictures were too dark, but you know what? I placed the blame on myself, sure that my laptop’s snazzy LCD screen was causing me to see images clearer and brighter than they really were.

This week my frustration finally went over the top. Here’s why. I have a great photograph of a white wall with a large yellow daisy painted on it. Thinking it would make a good photo card, I had it developed along with a group of other photos I needed for a collaboration in which I’m participating. Actually, I had many photos processed. When I had a look at my prints, my white wall with a yellow daisy was instead a cream wall with an orange daisy. Or you could stretch it and say it was a dark yellow daisy but, honestly, it looked orange to me. There were problems with some other photographs as well.

So I decided, on the spot, that I needed to get these same photographs developed somewhere else. I needed a comparison. After all, I thought, maybe the problem was with my photographs and alternate processing would reveal that, and I could then try to correct my mistakes. (Yes, my mind went there again...blaming myself.) And I thought of Pikto, a photo lab here in Toronto. Last year my friend Nancy recommended them to me, but I just never got around to trying them out. But yesterday was the day.

So the captain and I headed down to the Distillery District and into Pikto. I dropped off my memory stick, we walked around and happily found The Sweet Escape (a wonderful bakery where we enjoyed a delicious lunch), and then returned to pick up my photos.

Guess what? The white wall was white, the yellow daisy was yellow. A miracle! The black-and-white images did not have a green tinge to them. The photograph of Terra showed a dog with bright black and white fur, not muddy black and pale grey. An ochre duotone did not look orange. More miracles! My gosh, my photographs actually looked, um, right. Like I thought they should.

There were other differences too -- to be fair, some quite subtle -- but suffice it to say that overall, the prints were absolutely superior to those done at Black’s.

I think I’ll be seeing more and more of the Distillery District from now on.

Time for another Talisman Tree

It's Tuesday....so once again I offer up another in the continuing series of my Talisman Tree creations. I have two others on the go right now and more waiting to be started, so I don't see an end in sight!

This time, the tree is from my own street, although next week's tree is once again one photographed on my travels. I worked on the colours of this week's project almost every day for the past week; I just could not get it right. Then, almost like magic -- and why should that surprise me, they are after all talsiman trees -- it all came together and I knew it was complete.

I still have to get my Etsy shop up and running, something I was determined to do before 2008 ended. When the captain and I returned from our anniversary cruise in early November it was on the front burner. Of course, 2008 took a dramatic turn for me in late November and many plans were put on the back burner. Just getting through Christmas was an accomplishment! But I've been thinking these trees could be front and centre in my upcoming Etsy shop, perhaps a series of greeting cards.....or printed on canvas and then mounted......or even as straight-up prints, ready for framing. Just thinking out loud here, but the ideas are buzzing in my head right now.

Finding inspiration close to home

Brrrr. It's a chilly, wet day here in Toronto; you could even call it gloomy. So different from just a few days ago, when it was warm and sunny, with brilliant blue skies that hinted at summer.

But I am not depressed. Instead, I'm tickled to see that the challenge this week at Moody Monday is inspiration, because a recent outing with the captain on one of those glorious days left me totally inspired.

On Friday, it was just too nice to stay home and so we ventured onto the grounds of the former Guild Inn -- once a stunning mansion, it became one of Toronto's finest hotels, also an artist colony of sorts. No longer a hotel, the building is boarded up and has fallen into terrible disrepair; a fire several months ago added insult to injury. But the grounds....oh, the grounds. For decades it has been a park of sorts, showcasing statuary and architectural fragments moved there from Toronto's downtown core when progress reared its head and old buildings were being torn down to make way for new, shiny steel towers.

I thought the captain and I would have the place to ourselves but instead there were older couples out strolling, dog walkers, and of course, a couple of other photographers. We spent only two hours there yet I managed to take more than 600 photos (!) and, amazingly, I didn't get to every area.

The above digital collage is an example of the inspiration I found there. And with so many wonderful images now stored on my hard drive, I look forward to many more happy hours of creation.

Feel Better

For two days now, I have been trying to figure out how I was going to tackle the Photo Theme for Thursday challenge: signs.

Okay, those of you who know me well, stop laughing. If you don't yet know me well, my friends and family are amused because they all know that signs are my passion. If it has letters, I can almost never resist taking a photograph of it. As you might imagine, this leads to LOTS of images with words and letters in them.

For example, I briefly considered using my image gallery of signs -- signs, words, letters -- as my entry, but with almost 300 photographs in it to date, that would have been a bit much.

Inspiration finally came from an unexpected discovery near the front door of a local barber shop. I love the forceful red capital letters, the weathered rot, and of course the message. Who doesn't want to feel better?

One odd thing....I can't manage to get the photo montage to appear any larger here, so please click on it to see it full-blast. I'd like to claim it's Blogger's fault but I am surely just not doing something right here.

Inspire Me Thursday: Green

This morning I checked the Inspire Me Thursday web site, curious about this week's challenge. When I saw "green", I knew I was in trouble -- not from lack of material, but from an overload! A quick peek at my Flickr photo galleries revealed many photographs that I have tagged with green. I thought about creating a montage of green, like I did last year with yellow. I thought about one of my numerous nature photographs. I even thought about it over lunch, which was a bowl of homemade green split pea soup -- I (briefly) contemplated getting the camera and photographing my meal.

Somehow I ended up perusing the hundreds of photographs I took in January at Savannah's historic and eerily beautiful Bonaventure Cemetery, eventually deciding to try a photoshop experiment (different textures, different blending modes...) on one of them, a recent technique I've been trying out using many different colour variations.

Even in January the cemetery was rich with green without my (photoshop) assistance -- both the hanging grey-green spanish moss and the dark green decay on many of the older stone images contributing to the verdant display there -- but I must say, I'm pleased with the results of my experiment!

Talisman Tree Tuesday, the continuation of the series

Here it is Tuesday again, so I have another Talisman Tree to share with you. As always, click on the image for a larger view. So far, to create these talismans, I have used a tree photograph I captured in Melbourne, Florida (the first Talsiman Tree), one photographed in Florida's Canaveral National Seashore park (the second Talisman Tree) and now today's tree, photographed in Savannah, GA. I so enjoy creating these pieces!

Have you seen Penny?

If you are in Toronto, will you please stop a moment and look at this picture. This is Penny, and she's been missing for ages now. You can read all about it at Finding Penny; there are lots more photos there as well. I remember when my cat went missing once; I was frantic, couldn't sleep, and walked and drove all the local streets at all hours of the day and night. That ended happily about 24 hours later; I can't imagine the pain of going through this week after week after week. So, if you could, please keep an eye out for Penny. She's likely in the High Park area, but you know dogs ... they are travellers. And if you could help publicize this, I'm sure that would help. I don't know Penny or her owners, it's just a story I read that touches my heart. Thanks.

It's Easter!

I looked through my photographs earlier and much to my surprise, could not find any pictures of bunnies or chicks or eggs. I love bunnies ... and chicks ... and eggs. But there's more to Easter than bunnies, there's duckies. They're mighty cute too!

Idle hands

There's an old saying that teaches us that idle hands do the devil's work. I don't think this quite qualifies as devil work though. I have idle hands tonight -- I'm not feeling up to par and so have just been sitting with my laptop, experimenting with different digital art techniques. I didn't really think I was accomplishing anything other than wasting time, but one thing led to another and suddenly something I had no intent on saving became something I quite liked.

But is it silly?

The challenge over at Photo Theme for Thursday is silly; it sounds easy but I found it quite difficult. Sure, I have photographs of lots of funny signs, but that's staying in my comfort area and I wanted to get out of that zone. Looking through photographs on my hard drive, I came across the photos I took at the Port Perry fair last year. One of the suggested subjects for silly over at PTFT was clowns and as I looked at the images, I found several photos I took of a garbage can with a clown head. Perfect.

Except. Except that I don't find clowns silly, I find them creepy. Even macabre at times. They give me the willies -- they don't look friendly and funny, they look like serial killers in disguise. Really. So I worked on the photo, but I don't think I was able to make it amusing. But it is a clown and so I guess on some level, for someone, it's silly. Not to me though.

Talisman Tree Tuesday

Thank you all so much for your lovely, encouraging comments on my previous post, The Talisman Tree. I have been working on similar pieces over the past couple of days with several images in various stages of creation, with the second in the series ready to share. I've titled this post "Talisman Tree Tuesday" as I hope to share a new image from this series here on my blog each and every Tuesday, so stay tuned. I am quite enthused by this new project -- I have oodles of tree photographs and so the ideas are all buzzing around in my head ... it seems the talisman tree idea has taken root with me (sorry about the pun.......)!

The Talisman Tree

A talisman is a good luck charm and while a tree might not seem like one, I'm taking a loose interpretation and equating inspiration with luck. Earlier this week I was inspired by the encaustics Marie Otero posted on her blog, Lost Aussie on the Loose: a series of three tree images, with her inspiration being the recent Australian bushfires. I loved the colours she used, I loved the use of trees. I have many tree photographs and zero inspiration (until now) on how to make them sing. So just last night I worked on the first in my own new series of tree images, taking inspiration from the pieces I saw on Marie's blog. I'm working with many layers, many textures. So here I am with a new piece of art, wanting to share it, and along comes the theme of talisman at Illustration Friday. I am going with my gut instinct on this coincidence and calling this new series "The Talisman Trees". What do you think?

Just an update.....want to see the second in the series? It's in my new post, Talisman Tree Tuesday. Please have a look!