New Banner

All morning I've been monkeying around with my graphics programs trying to create banners for my Art-Fire store. Their banners are so narrow it's hard to come up with an image that looks decent. The one I added at the top of my blog looks just terrible compressed to the 100 x 760 Art-Fire requires, so I won't be using it there. Though I like how it looks here, uncompressed the way it should be!!!!

I did finally come up with something to use, made from a digital collage I created, seriously cropped down & with text on top.


Here it is:

I also made up a bunch of collage sheets. I started with vintage postcard & cabinet card images, super-imposed them over my own landscape photos or journal pages, sized & retouched for quality then created full size collage sheets. It's a time consuming process, but I love doing it!!!! I'm out of my 28 lb. paper that I like to use for printing so getting to use them in my work will have to wait until I hit a supply store.

The little guy is spending the day with my mom & I hope to have a highly productive day because of it. There are at least three charm bracelets I need to finish, a bunch of items to photograph, journaling I want to do and a few supply orders to be placed. If I want to do all that I'd better stop playing with Picasa and get moving!

An Eiffel Tower For Mom

Today is my mom's birthday. Almost 9 years ago she and I spent a delightful day in Paris. Yes, only one day. And one glorious night touring the city, before taking the bullet rain to Provence. Since that time Mom has been back to Paris and is going again in a few months time. Lucky her....

For her birthday I decided to create a multi-viewed collage of the Eiffel Tower. I scanned in a Paris street map for starters. Layered over it is a cropped photo of the Eiffel Tower that I took while standing at the base of it. I also used an image of French writing that I had gotten free from an art magazine web site (Alas, the site name alludes me. It was months ago...) Using various image editing techniques and playing with saturation levels I was able to come up with 3 images I really liked. I printed them on a decent weight paper, cropped them and arranged all on canvas. Once I had an arrangement I liked I glued them down using my all-time favorite glue: gel medium. I want to add some paint and other embellishments to the piece before handing it over to Mom, but I did let her get a good look at it today and she loved it! Now if I could just figure out a way to get back to Paris I'd truly be a happy camper.....

The first three images are the collages I created on Picasa. The last image is all of them arranged and pasted onto canvas.

Yet More Nudes

I've been playing around in Picasa again creating multi-layered collages. The backgrounds for these were all created from my own scanned art work or photographs. The foregrounds are from vintage French Nudes. I love the ethereal look of these images and cannot wait to print them out and play around with them to see what I can come up with! I know I'll be making some mail art postcards with these and perhaps some ATC's as well. As for what else I'll make, I won't know until I do it. That's one thing about being a foot-loose and fancy free artist, you never know when inspiration will strike or what you'll create. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way....

Digital Collage

I've been playing with creating digital collages again. This one is by far my favorite so far. The background is from a journal page I did for a round robin I hosted (and got stiffed on!) a few years back. The foreground image is from a set of Art Nouveau images I own. I love the transparent, multi-layered look.

Digital Collage

I've been messing around with Picasa again. Trying to explore its many options and features. For me the best thing about the program is the ability to make digital collages from my art work. I just love the multi-layered collage option. It makes things look so darned cool & adds another dimension to my work. The piece shown is a multi-layered collage created from one of my Soul Collage cards and a journal page I'd done for a round robin. I've altered the colors to make them a bit more "freaky" than they actually were.