Doorway

For our second PS challenge, we chose "doorway" as the image to work with. I love the multiple doorways of this old ruin. An old photo of my daughter from camp added to the sense of multiplicities. I threw in an altered quote of T.S. Eliot.

Meg's Birthday Card

I made this card for Meg while she was at Mardi Gras and I was remembering how much fun I had the year that I went with them. I found an image I liked of a jester and cut out pieces to construct him. The hardest thing was getting the right size. Too big and it became much too large for a card, too small and I couldn't work with the tiny pieces. This one was just right. I was delighted when I went looking through my stash of stuff to find something to make the balls on the hat and skirt to find the perfect glue-on gems.

Marketing Fakarts

I designed this fake company one night in a fit of disgust at all the cliches I was seeing in Somerset Studio and Cloth Paper Scissors magazines. I was going to put a lot of work into making actual "artwork" that would demonstrate all the cliches and then send it into to Somerset Studio, but I decided it would be hard to tell the parody from some people's art. Instead I dashed off this flyer and sent it to my sister, thus getting it out of my system.

Tilting@Windmills.Gov

I was cleaning my work room and came across this piece that I made awhile ago. I can barely remember working on it, but I suspect I was more motivated by the political message than I was to make art. Since little has changed politically since then, it still seems relevant. I can see that I was also experimenting with using gel and metallic pens on black.

Half Full/Half Empty: A Tale of Two Glasses

For Sharon's birthday, I made an 8"x9" card/booklet out of paper, fabric and fabric-paper. I had participated in several discussions recently about optimism vs. pessimism and I wanted to do something on that theme. I chose the opening paragraph from Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities where he contrasts five opposing statements. I took the 5 postive ones and put them on a page with a large sun. The background substrate was paper-fabric covered with Lutradur. The sun was made of many fabrics stitched on. I also used stitching to provide details. The negative statements went with an old gnarly tree in the moonlight, again made of fabric on fabric-paper with stitching for details. For the covers I sewed a half red, half blue fabric background and sewed on a cardstock title. I attached the two pages by sewing them both to a link of chain at three places. I'll let you decide, "Is the glass half-full or half-empty?"

Balance

I've been wanting to use up some of my green collage elements and also wanting to do a collage about balance. Voila! Synergy!

Antiquity Challenge

To help me learn Photoshop CS5, my sister Sharon challenged me to produce a piece that included "antiquity" images that each of us chose and then used with a background of our own making. I welcomed the challenge in order to learn some new techniques, and I thought I welcomed the theme because I have used antiquities many times in my art (mostly in soulcollage). Interestingly, she and I independently chose images from Central American cultures. Since I wanted to use my own photo graphs for backgrounds, culling through years of my pictures of trips through Mexico, Honduras and Turkey was overwhelming. But I learned a lot about blending modes and adjustment layers. After spending way too many hours struggling with it, I finally decided to call it done so I could move on to my next project. Thanks, Sharon, it was fun!