Hanging Around

Playing with what's hanging around. And starting to feel the old pull of bead work. Coral RED is on my mind, mixed with my always favorite turquoise. Had the day off and did some digging in my bead stash. Mulling ideas. Interest doesn't always mean action and I'm doing a bit of project juggling right now. Who isn't?

Sketching: Before and After

I'm following up on a comment I made while responding to Taos Sunflower in an earlier post, about sketching, post processing changes in Photoshop Elements and providing before and after images. The sketch above is in its original state. (My sketchy thoughts of what Tinkerbell or some other faerie might look like.)

Taken a few steps further in Elements, she leaves me with the impression she is emerging from a tree. A magical woodland faerie? To arrive in her woody state she went through a few processes, most I cannot remember I'm afraid. I tend to apply and remove lighting, filters and make other changes in rapid succession, until I hit on something that feels right. Then on to the next round until I'm comfortable with the results.

Sorry for the signature across the faces. Just discovered my copyright protected images from both blogs are being grabbed and posted in the 'google images' area without my permission. Hopefully this will be a deterrent while I work on why that seems OK to google.

Falling Down

Falling down and all around!

Sketch Practice

Sketch practice with a couple of filters added to darken it. I tend to draw too lightly. Gee, wonder if that has anything to do with not really knowing how to do it? Uh, yep. And that is why it's called practice. She arrived through the pencils imagination but the dress is a version of one I had back in the sixties. Chocolate brown velour. Soooo comfortable. My mom hated it. Well, it didn't exactly have that dark neck to shoulder portion. Actually it started about where that ends, with gathers. Hey, it was the sixties. If mom's keeping an eye on me from out there in the universe, I suspect she is much happier with the revised version.

Seattle Sunday

On one of my every-other-week Sunday morning drives, the boat ramp at Manchester grabbed me again. It was a really foggy morning. As I stood there the brisk winds quickly moved the fog along. Off in the distance Seattle began to appear with hints of early light on the buildings. Soon the fog formed one large bank behind the city.

My camera can't pick up Seattle with clarity at that distance. This photo was cropped bringing it closer than it actually is from Manchester. Soft, out of focus photos really can be some of the most fun to play with. The white section at the city base is a departing ferry. Nothing like enjoying a Seattle Sunday without involving the freeway.

At Longmire there Sits

In Rainier National park at Longmire there sits a wonderful community hall back off and away. It is log built with a craftsman's copper lights hanging from the ceiling on racks and around the room as sconces. The lights are delightfully tipsy and irregular. A huge rock fire place rests at one end of the room extending to the full height of the tall walls. When the fire is crackling and the coppery lamps cast light on the log structure, clocks turn back. Or so it seems.

Silvery Moon

By the light of the Silvery Moon...

Across the Large Bay

Driving home I stopped to shoot this across the large bay. It was hazy with the palest of blue gray tree lines out there. Not a clear shot to begin with as I don't shoot with a camera with a long lens. The benefit is some of the blurry shots are the most fun to enhance with digital filters.

Playing with Images

Having a bit of fun playing with color to black and white (digital) transitions. Those soft linear elements in the background are the exciting vertical blinds in my office at work.

Snipping Away

I'm out of practice so my hands are a bit stiff for paper cutting. When given a warm up, they love to get back to it. Though I enjoy cutting a variety of things , hearts are one of those elemental shapes I've never been able to resist. One of those things, like snow flakes, that shoot me right back in time. My gray haired versions may have more character than those from childhood but they've all been fun to snip away at.

Time to Wake Up!

It seems I'm beginning my fall wake-up cycle. This season is my favorite and sometimes I marvel at that fact since with it comes stiffened fingers, cold toes and the like. Like they say, this aging stuff isn't for sissies. Still, something about the wonderful colors, amazing scents and that quieting of nature as it prepares for a long winters sleep lifts me up.

The lovely sunflowers a dear friend brought to work to cheer my day, after losing my kitty buddy this month, have been magic to watch as they have moved from garden fresh to crispy and twisted. Striking in each stage, just as the seasons ahead will be. Hope you can get out there and enjoy it all!

Where Do the Antelope Roam

Why, on the range of course.

Here's the PROOF.

Playing with Nature

Playing with nature at summers end.

The House Up the Hill

The little house up the hill from the church where the family wedding took place this summer.

Self

Among the dabblers I know and others I know of, there are groups, weekly blog posts and other avenues for self portrait work. I have made a handful of attempts with the camera but find I can rarely look into it. Nor am I usually found in front of anyone elses. Not sure when I became so self conscious.

The ones I've done that were fun to do have been mixtures. Mixing a photo and other layers into something "else". Basically what I do with "everything else" dabble wise. And so it is with this first posted self portrait. Layers, alterations, hand cut stencils, ect. It looks very little like "me". I'm far more lined, spotty, fair and sport a more prominent nose. I'm exploring adaptation, perspective and mood.

The process still feels a little weird and uncomfortable, but I usually learn the most with uncomfortable as a starting point. Have you tried a self portrait?

Scattered

Paper cutting and digital layers.

How Do You Process Your Creative Ideas?

I don't know how you function, but I tend to do things in stages when working on creative projects. Between my day job, available energy and general demands, working on projects tends to happen on more of a "when possible" time frame.

And then there's the issue of ideas and inspiration. My sub-conscious has an unending supply of ideas which it sends in steady streams to my conscious mind at all the wrong times; while I'm trying to fall asleep, during my sleep, while at work, in the shower, driving to and from work and on. Bottom line, rarely at a time when I can actually jot things down. Not that these ideas are terrific, but they seem to run on a reel, repeating in different versions until I can finally spit them out one way or the other. Well, other than actually spitting. (Vile habit.) That reel of thoughts can be overwhelming and make it hard to focus when there finally is time to dabble.

Many of my friends and cohorts in dabbling are faithful journalers. That process can help apply and flush out ideas at the same time. Great process and I have tried it. The good news is it always re-directs me to a specific project. The bad news, it always re-directs me to a specific project and that brain flush doesn't happen. I've tried keeping a tape recorder in the car, pen and paper by the bed, using the camera to catch shots of things that have triggered ideas and so many other methods. Nope. Nada. Nix, nil nay.

BUT, about that working in stages, it has helped me learn to have patience with projects. Some of the spontaneity is lost with my stages approach, but often the slowed process gifts me with a better journey and end result. The journey is better because I'm slowed enough to try more options and find the zone more frequently.

A friend and I were laughing a week or so ago about each having a one day workshop, at different times, with Julianna Coles. She is the queen of getting you to take action on paper with out over thinking. She is a wonderful teacher/guide. The class was a strange cross between boot camp, therapy and driving a 5,000 mile an hour race car. (Dreamt that drive years ago.) At the end of the day, finding out how much I could accomplish in one sitting, by not over thinking, was amazing. However, not something I could do regularly without imploding.

How does any of this rambling apply to the image above? Well, aspects of it were created one to five or so years ago. The foundation of it was done a few months ago. And the final aspects were added this morning. It was fun to do though it flunks the high speed test.

It started those five years ago with an acrylic monoprint in vivid blues and greens. Out of that came a shape that reminded me of a dress on a dress form. Trimmed out, reduced and copied in multiples the resulting (trimmed out again) small images were glued down in a circle. Once photographed, that image could be used in many ways and has been. A few years later I photographed a wonderfully cloudy sky. And a year or so after that the clouds, now in graphic shapes, married a chartreuse base. Today that circle of dresses, in a variety of sizes and opacities, made a second marriage with that cloudy base. And that's that.

Hope you're having a grand Saturday.

Cloudy Day Color

Thought I would post a little Dale Chilhuly glass

for some color, on what the weather man says

will be a Northwest cloudy day.

Finding Balance Among the Angles

Paper cut yoga pose with stitched fabric and paper layers.

Then unified with a digital sponge layer.

If You Had Wings...

If you had wings, would you keep them covered?

Paper, fabric and paint.

Paint and Computer Play

A little acrylic paint and computer play. Some of my favorite colors.

Summer Rain

Not sure if this is a result of remembering or wishing for a good summer rain. Either way thats what it feels like to me. Do you see it? Summer Rain. Takes me back to this... Which reminds me of this... and THIS. OK, I'm all better now.

Characters

Like many of you, I'm drawn to creating characters. They usually originate from paper or fabric cuttings. Most aren't intricate or refined but seem to find themselves during the scissor snipping. That was the case with the girl above and with the characters in the studio header. The difference between them is the girls layers were done in cloth and the figures above were cut from medium weight black paper or vintage pages of music or salvaged un-repairable books. Those aging pages aren't always the best way to go for stability reasons. A full version of Stargirl (above) can be found on my website. This was a piece done a few years ago. Find time for something you love to do.

Painting Bubbles

This was one of the small paintings I wrote about doing all those years ago while ill. I discovered painting bubbles makes you feel lighter. I've been playing with it a bit in Photoshop Elements. Hope you are feeling light tonight!

Fibers Rank High

On my list of fun things to play with, fibers rank high and have since I was a little girl learning to sew by hand and machine. But today... today there are almost no comparisons to the types and quality of fibers available to me in the 50's. Now its like going to the candy store when you go in search of supplies and the quality of them is amazing. Believe me, there were no stores where I grew up selling weaving/spinning, yarn or fabric dyeing supplies. Or vintage fabrics, hah, not likely! It would take the 60's to begin to shake things up, in many ways and many places.

These days one of the things I would play with more often, given the room to spread out, is wet felting. Not until my first workshop with Mary Stanley did I really have a chance to enjoy wet felting as we worked in the nuno felting process, in 2008 at Artfiberfest. A sample of that piece is above. A class with Mary is a treat you won't forget or regret. Needle felting is another enjoyment. Many of the supplies work in both dry and wet felting types. Nuno felting is more of a fiber marriage with, in this case, a chiffon scarf as the base and a mixture of wool roving's for the top. You really have to work the fibers together resulting in the same kind of gratification that comes with a day of digging in the garden. Your dragging but happy. Give it a try!

Pattern Compulsions

I guess I should begin with a confession. Specifically, a pattern compulsion confession. It started ten or twelve years ago with acrylics, though the mediums have shifted around in that time and my patterns tend to be less rigid these days.

The January it began I was pretty sick. To keep from loosing my mind during the endless coughing, I painted. (Yes, I wore a mask.) It gave me something else to focus on and pattern-ing required less concentration. I used brushes, torn foam shapes and anything else I could find to make paint impressions. When the health cloud lifted some weeks later I had quite a collection of small patterns on 5x7 watercolor paper. They weren't incredible but some turned out pretty fun. It was then that I developed a kinship with Kinko's. Those color copiers, with their wonderful range of enlarging and reducing options, supplied me with a good deal of layered and collage fun. My friends would likely tell you my eyes would glisten when I talked about the copy shop.

Time moved on, jet printers got better, cheaper and inks became stable. Enter the digital camera and what ever I created could be photographed, moved to my Mac, back to paper or fabric and layered again. Over and over. (It is only now that I have a printer with a scanner or I could have been doing some of that much earlier. I still don't use the scanner much, as the files are so big.) Of course the process can be reversed as well with a photo as the starting point, playing with it, printing it, painting on it, photographing that and on it goes.

What you see above began with a cropped photo of two pink heirloom roses, shot in the Port Townsend Rose Park about eight years ago. It has been a few things in that time but recently it transitioned into what you see here. Who knows what the future of those old roses holds. You have to admit, it's a GREAT time to be alive!

Monet I'm Not

Welcome to Sea Mist Studio! If you are a reader of my Sea Mist and Sunsets blog or found your way here through other means, as my Grandma used to say, come on in and sit a spell. If you have been following my other blog you are probably asking yourself, what in the world is she doing? She can't possibly have MORE to say?

Well, when Sea Mist and Sunsets kicked off last October I wasn't sure how often I would manage to post, but wanted a place to share photos, remembrances, thoughts on things that matter to me and hear your thoughts. We are all about footprints these days, so maybe I wanted to leave a few of those as well. Turns out I really enjoy creating the posts. And I love this wonderful opportunity to know folks from all around the world. Amazing, that. Anyway, the things I'm going to post here don't really fit over there. Though some of it would have gone to my website in days-gone-by, this takes far less time.

In my dreams I have a studio where I keep my crazy range of supplies. It has open walls to hang projects, light from windows and overheads, endless workspace, LOTS of storage, music, along with a place for friends to come play. The supplies are as real as the little bitty (read no Studio) house I live in. Sea Mist Studio seems to be the perfect trade off. There will be no formalities here so if you want to kick off your shoes and dance, go for it. While here you may find completed, half done or never-to-be-finished projects, things and people I find inspiring and who knows what else. It's a play room. Just remember, Monet or any number of other experts in their various crafts I'm not. This is about the fun of the process. Join me?

Things should start in the next week or so, once I've finished setting the blog up.