2B Day 8 Part 1 : Chalk Messages

 

This week, Kim showed us how to make any font look like a chalk drawing based on a tutorial by SN Fontaholic.    I've been looking forward to this lesson since I started the class in April.  That's one benefit of being so far behind--I have a little more time to process the lessons and let ideas percolate through ...  Work has been hectic lately--Most days there is so much to do, I'm not sure what to do first.  I actually wrote the word "Focus" on a post-it note and stuck it to the desk to help me zero in on what I need to be doing. 

For the Frilly Focus Chalkboard above, I followed Kim's recipe and the Fontaholic tutorial pretty faithfully.  The font is Chalk-Hand-Lettering-Shaded.  When I got to the Sketch-Charcoal/Chalk Filter Layer, it gave me unexpected (but still pleasing) results.  Unless you had black chalk, I'm not sure how you'd get an actual real-life chalkboard to come out like this. 

 For Focus Version 2, again, I pretty much followed the recipe as given.  I had to try this a couple times to get a version that seemed to work.  I think I got it now ...

This one looks like it was written with a wet finger on a chalky chalkboard.  I like the effect.  Again, this is what I got with the default Chalk and Charcoal filter settings.   I guess it's more charcoal than chalk?  I think this is a results of copying the blurred text layer rather than the clean text layer. 

"Reinvent Yourself." This phrase is another one that seems to be good advice for my current work environment.  It worked for David Bowie and Madonna for years--why not for me?   Of all three chalk boards, I think I like this one the best.   For this one, I used Kim Klassen's Chalk Magic texture for a background and DearJoe4 as font.  I also used Colleen Ray's modified recipe to get a chalkboard effect.  She used the Dissolve blend mode for one of the layers.   I could have done more with the layer mask to erase bits and pieces, but it was difficult to make it look natural, so I gave up on that part of the lesson. 

2B Day 6 : Nest From Above

The Beyond Beyond lesson this week required us to shoot a scene from above.  I used one of the bird nest pictures from the Light-hunting photo shoot on the weekend.  This photo was shot upstairs in a stairwell window at 2 pm on a Saturday afternoon.  It was overcast, but sometimes sunny.  The nest was sitting on a foam white board which made the perfect blank slate for this exercise.  This was a new staging site and time for me. 

Background image - straight outta my camera.

Here's the processing step-by-step :
Layer 1 : Background image
Layer 2 : Copy background image ; Screen blend mode 34% opacity
Layer 3 : Kim Klassen's Paper Stained Light Texture ; Multiply 100%
Layer 4: Copy Layer 4 ; Color Burn 18%
Layer 5 : Text - Pristina Font ; Normal blend mode ; 71% opacity

I know the texture will look heavy and overdone for some of the Beyonders.  But Kim's "Barely There" preset just didn't work very well with this image, nor did her recipes for this lesson.  I took careful notes, though, so they may come in handy in future. 

2B Day 5 : Hunting for the Right Light

This week's Beyond Beyond lesson had me searching the house for light ...  From the get-go, I was starting to over-think this assignment.  I'd have to make some kind of spreadsheet to chart not only which window in the house, but also the time of day, time of year, weather conditions ... on and on ...  I finally decided that was silly.  Yes, I COULD chart all that, but what would I do with that data?  If I really wanted to re-create a certain light effect, I'd have to wait for the perfect conditions to come around again?  Nah!  Keep it Simple!  This exercise is just to make us stretch a little and perhaps find a new staging area that we hadn't discovered previously at home.  This is all about doing the best you can with the light you have.  There were some surprises : The 2 places I tend to stage still-lifes did not work at all this time of day. They were both too flooded with light.  But these other sites that I'd never considered before worked very well.  I have a whole new world of possibilities for staging areas at home.

Above, you see a collage made from the 9 sites in our house that I tested for this exercise at 2 pm on a Saturday afternoon (having purchased the little bird nest at Hobby Lobby earlier in the day).   It was overcast at the time.  These are all straight-out-of-my camera.   The nest is not real, nor are the eggs, but I was inspired by seeing a broken blue robin's egg on the dog walk yesterday.  Let's hope it broke out of its shell of its own accord and wasn't lunch for some other hungry bird.

In this collage, you can see some of the many ways to ADD light to an image if it needs a little help.
1.  The original - in a North Window
2.  Kim's Let There Be Light Light Room Preset - Perfect light with 1 click!
3.  Sybil Trick - Used Kim's Texture Sybil with her recommended recipe
4.  Added a Radial Gradient in PhotoShop Elements
5. Added a Linear gradient in PSE for Kim's "Blanket of Dreamy Light"
6.  LightRoom Adjustment Brush to add a Radial Light by hand

The original image for this exercise was a little darker than most of what I shot for this set.  It needed a little help and seemed well-suited to all the treatments above.  Other images in the North window came out a little better when I bounced light back in with a white board. 

There was so much in this lesson, it could have lasted the whole month.  I wrote about 12 pages of notes for this lesson alone.  Jam-packed!  I can't believe what a bargain this year-long class is!  I did take careful notes, and I will revisit this lesson for future reference.  Previously, if a picture needed more light, I would use the I'm Feeling Lucky in Picasa, or pull it into RadLab.  Ironically, I tried RadLab on this image, and none of the stylets sang to me for this particular image.  Now I have 5 new tools to add Light!

Credit goes to Anja Rabius, another 2B classmate.  I really liked the way she presented this lesson on her blog, so I followed her model.   As for the subject matter, I was inspired by the nest with jelly beans on Sarah's blog.  She also found some beautiful and unexpected light through this exercise. Thank you, Ladies.  You are both an inspiration to me.

All week, George Harrison's "Give me light" lyric has been running through my head.  Thus, I had to include the video for it.   He was my favorite Beatle.  Enjoy!

Give me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth) - George Harrison
[Sorry--Blogger is not letting me embed the videos anymore, so you'll just have to follow the link if you want to hear it. Cheers!]

Liberate Your Art Postcard Exchange 2013

This year, I decided to participate in Kat Sloma's Liberate Your Art Postcard Exchange.  The purpose was three-fold : 1) Get some of my own artwork professionally printed, 2) get it out into the world, and 3) enjoy receiving postcards from other like-minded creatives.  In April, 200+ artists worldwide sent postcards of their artwork (plus address labels and stamps) to Kat Sloma, who then fostered the exchange sending postcards around the world.  What fun to watch the mail every day!
Here's what I received :

 from Sherry Harmes at Amook Island Creations near Kodiak, Alaska. 

On the back of the p/c, Sherry included the date, temp, wind speed, and wave height.  A great way to share more of where this card came from.

This was sent by "Pearl."  She says this is an embroidery of a Buddhist Parasol, a symbol of protection.

by Roberta Warshaw.

Typograffitti by Viv Halliwell.

 

From Lindsy's Garden.

"Adorned and Alone" by Kat Sloma.  Everyone who participated in this year's exchange got one of these gorgeous postcards by Kat Sloma, the organizer.  

*********************************************

Here are the cards I sent out :

I have extra cards, so if you like what you see, contact me and I'll send one to you, too--wherever you are ...  Cheers!

Linking up with Kat's Liberate Your Art Postcard Exchange 2013 Blog Hop :

Beyond Beyond - Day 4 : Inside Out or Cello by the Lake

 

Cello by the Lake

For this week's lesson, Kim asked us to photograph something that normally resides inside the house, outside.  Inside Out.  At first I was kind of stumped as to what to do ...  Everyone in the class had such great ideas -- raspberries on a wooden stump, a Ball canning jar at sunset, a gold picture frame hung on dry prairie grasses, bathroom table.

While I was going through the lesson notes and vids, I was also listening to the radio.  45 North was interviewing cellist Zoe Keating.   The title of her new album is called Into the Trees ...   Then I got to thinking about how much I have always loved cello; how grateful and pleasantly surprised that my kid actually decided to play cello this year in school, and how we'll probably have to give it back at the end of the school year--only a month away.    He told me he chose cello for the simple reason that he could have a practice cello at home and wouldn't have to lug it back and forth to school.  Practical.  I am amazed at what he's learned in just 1 year!  The Orchestra teacher is a miracle worker.   ;-)    So I'm looking at the cello leaning against Oliver's desk and I think : The Woods!  I can photograph OKL's cello in the woods!  Except, we don't have any woods nearby ...  But we do have a lake with trees!  So this morning, I took his cello for a ride ...  The cello is much easier to photograph than a surly 6th grader!  Such lovely curves--so many possibilities!

Here's the photo I started with.  

Here is the processing on the single photo at the top of this post :
Layer 1 : Background Image
Layer 2 : Copy Background Layer > RadLab (Troy+Antique Tone+Boutwell Magic Glasses 2+ EZ Burn 2)
Layer 3 : Kim Klassen's Cool Grunge Texture - Multiply blend mode at 51% opacity
Layer 4 : Copy Layer 3 - Soft Light 54%
Layer 5 : Kim Klassen's Paper Stained Music Texture - Multiply 52%
Layer 6 : Kim Klassen's Break Free Texture - Soft Light at 72%
Layer 7 : Kim Klassen's Pumpkin Grunge - Overlay at 24%

I came away with several decent shots from the Cello by the Lake photo shoot, so I wanted to try another Light Room Layout with some of the other shots.

Here's the Layout in Light Room with the images straight outta my camera.

Here's the processing to get the texturized version above :
Layer 1 : Background Image
Layer 2 : RadLab with Troy + Gramma's Tap Shoes + EZ Burn2
Layer 3 : Kim Klassen's Cool Grunge Texture - Multiply at 53%
Layer 4 : Text (added last)  Pea Keylor Font
Layer 5 : Kim Klassen's Paper Stained Music - Multiply 51%
Layer 6 : Kim Klassen's Break Free Texture - Soft Light 72%
Layer 7 : Kim Klassen's Warm Sun Texture - Soft Light 41%
                     with Layer Mask to brush off some texture on cellos

Enjoy Zoe Keating's "The Optimist:"

April Photo-Heart Connection

Any guesses as to what this might be?

Scroll down to find out ...










Answer : It's the drain in the parking lot at work one day this spring.  The snow was melting fast and furious that day.  There was a mountain of snow nearby pushed up from clearing the parking lot.   There was still some ice leading to the drain, mixed with sand spread on the pavement to provide traction.  The sun was shining through it just right.  I was glad I had my iPad along to capture the moment.

I know it's basically a gutter, and that I should be looking up for inspiration.  But there's just something about finding Beauty in the down-places and rising up from the gutter -- or rather just finding beauty in what is--even if it is a gutter.    Cheers! 

See the other Photo-Heart Offerings this month :

Beyond Beyond Day 3 : Varied Focal Points

Plodding along with Beyond Beyond Lessons ...  I decided I needed to do the lessons in order because they build on each other.   This one looked at varied focus within a shot and then creating a presentation layout.  For this exercise, I used the portrait setting on my Olympus C770 camera.  It's supposed to give you an in-focus subject with a blurred background.   Though I could have also used the Manual Mode with the Canon S90, it needed a battery recharge when I was ready to shoot, after waiting days for the right light--Sheesh!  I even had cue cards written up about how to use the manual focus, and then I find out the battery is dead at the appropriate time.  Good to have a backup!

 

Here's the print layout in Light Room.  The actual layout was pretty simple to do, with Kim's instructions.  I ran into problems when it came time to print to .jpg.   I had missed the setting in the Print Module for this cue, and was only getting prompts to print to a real printer.    (The joys of learning a new program.)  I had to re-watch the video to sort out what I missed.  One little click, and then it all worked.  I was able to pull it into PSE (There must be an easier way-my method was pretty clumsy.)  where I added the text (Journal Font).  I experimented with adding textures to this one, but it didn't seem to need it ...

It might seem like I haven't been doing anything the last 2 weeks, but let me tell ya : There's been a lot of "getting ready" for this class.   Kim talks about how wonderful Light Room is.  So far, I have been reluctant to spend $149 on LR--but I'm warming up to the idea.  I've been using Picasa to organize my pics and do basic edits.  So far, that's been fine.  But I'm starting to realize that Picasa tends to save .psd files as jpg if you save changes to an entire folder.  Ka-Boom! Then I've lost access to the layers I worked so hard to develop.  Doh!   So I'm warming up to the idea of Light Room.  Fortunately, Adobe is currently offering the free beta version of Light Room 5.  So I downloaded that as a kind of free trial.   But that also required an upgrade to my operating system.  One thing leads to another ...   More Delays.  But now things finally seem to be ready to go full-steam ahead.

Beyond Beyond - Day 2 : Patience and Aperture Priority

For this lesson, Kim talked about the virtues of shooting in AV-mode with special focus on aperture priority.    The photo above was shot with f/2.5.  Now I have a better idea of what that really means, and how I can call up this effect when I want it.  F/2.5 refers to a shallow depth-of-field with just a small part of the image in focus.  In this case, the foreground is in focus, while the background is dreamy and blurry.  Aperture priority is kind of like the iris in your eye. If I had bumped it up to f/8.0, all parts of the bowl (near and far) would be in focus. 

Here's the processing on today's image :
Layer 1) Background image
Layer 2) Copy background image ; Screen blend mode at 14% opacity
Layer 3) Kim Klassen's Aurora-bl Texture - Multiply 26%
Layer 4) Kim Klassen's Sweet Treat Texture - Multiply 22%
Layer 5) Text - My Underwood Fint - Normal 58%

As for the subject matter, it's been a long winter.  I see spring blossoms elsewhere in the US, but it seems that's still weeks away in Wisconsin.  So I am reminding myself to be patient - Spring will come.  All we have blooming at the moment is pussy willows.  This crystal bowl makes me think of apple and cherry blossoms--all in good time!

I also made myself an f-Stop Aperture Priority key so that I'd have examples of each setting on my little Canon S90.    These are "slices" from 2 journal quilts I made.  The stitching shows the clarity of each f-stop setting. 

Beyond Beyond - Day 1 : Variations on a Theme

I'm behind even though I'm right on time.  Everyone else seems to have started Beyond Beyond way back in January.  I decided to wait until I finished Beyond Layers (Section II) in April, or I'd feel too overwhelmed with double assignments.  And here I am--feeling overwhelmed anyway.  A few Beyond Layers friends recommended jumping in at Day 12, but it felt like I was missing things from the first 12 lessons--foundational things that would be used and built upon in later lessons.  So I went back to the beginning--a very good place to start.  I'll be plodding along at my turtle's pace for the remainder of the year.   Too late to even add my offering to the assignment page.  Sigh!

About this image :  Kim asked us to set up a scene and take 10 (or so pictures) from all angles.  Then we could make a collage or just work up the best one from the set.  A neighbor has a pussy willow tree currently in full bloom : A perfect subject for this time of year!  The lighting was late afternoon in front of a rainy and foggy window with southern exposure.

Photo Processing :
Layer 1 : Background Layer
Layer 2 : Copy Background Layer
Layer 3: Kim Klassen's Karla Texture ; Multiply blend mode at 45%
Layer 4 : Outside the Fray's Light Grunge 04 Texture ; Soft Light at 52%
Layer 5 : Text - Pristina Font - Overlay at 88%
Layer 6 : Color Fill frame - Soft Light at 46%

Beyond Layers Retrospective

Now that the year-long class is finished, I decided to put some of my favorite photos from the BL journey into a collage (an easy task with Picasa).  This isn't everything, but it's a good share of the work I did for the class this past year.  Looking back, I can tell you where the triumphs and the frustrations were with PhotoShop Elements.    In the end, I will say it was worth the effort!  I've come a long way!  And I love textures even more than I did before ...

You can view the mid-year retrospective slideshow with music.  

Where do I go from here?  I signed up for Kim's Beyond Beyond (aka 2B) class, so my endeavors in digital photography will continue!  Join us, if you like ...

Beyond Layers Day 103 - Kim's Light Tulips

Kim gave us one last sample image for us to do with what we liked.  The same tulip as last time, but with a light background this time around.  I am partial to these colors : Pink and Green and Cream.  I even made a quilt a while back in this color scheme.  Sigh!

Here's my processing step-by-step :
Layer 1 : Kim's sample Background image cropped
Layer 2 : Copy Layer 1. Radlab : POS Lens, Rusty Cage, EZBurn2
Layer 3 : Kim Klassen's Texture Naturally - Soft Light 100% Opacity
Layer 4 : Text - Pristina Font ; Normal blend mode 47%

Here's Kim's original sample image.   Lovely in itself!

This is nearly the last day of class for Beyond Layers II.  I'm sad to see it ending--so I signed up for Beyond Beyond (aka 2B), but now I'm already 4 months behind and a bit overwhelmed at the thought of jumping in so late.  I'm also contemplating purchasing LightRoom4.  I've been using Google's free Picasa which has worked great for organizing photos and doing basic edits, even some fun effects comparable to Instagram.  However, I'm realizing that although Picasa can save psd files, it tends to flatten everything down to a jpg, which means I loose the layers from Photoshop Elements.  I'm almost ready to make the Light Room leap ...  It will be easier with Kim's lessons forcing me to see and do new things with it.

Beyond Layers Day 102 : My Version of Kim's Tulips on Black

This week, Kim presented us with one of her beautiful pics to which we were to add our own mark. 
I played with it, and decided on this version.  Less is more.  Simple is best. 

Here's what I did :
Layer 1 : Background Layer
Layer 2 : Copy background Layer with Orton Filter
                Why?  I really wanted that tulip to be filled with light! It had to GLOW from the inside!
Layer 3 : Copy Layer 2 - RadLab Iron Mouse Stylet
Layer 4 : Text ; Dear Joe 4 Font with Transluscent Glass Layer Style

I tried some other things with brushes and frames and textures, but it all just detracted from the beauty and simplicity of the tulip.   One thing that would have worked was cropping it down--but I was having problems with the crop tool insisting on a particular ratio--even after re-setting the tool.  I wasn't able to zero in on the section I wanted to focus on.   So I settled on the version you see above.

Art Beyond the Lens : Working with Digital Textures Book Review

It's been a while since I had a book that I just "ate up."  Sarah Gardner's Art Beyond the Lens : Working with Digital Textures is such a book.   I asked my local public library to borrow a copy for me.  They informed me that they would purchase a copy, and I could be the first to check it out.  Yahoo!

I like it so much, I'm going to purchase my own copy (in print--no less), so I can take notes and continue to oooh and ahhh over her results.   This is a beautiful book with step-by-step instructions on why and how to add textures to images.  She also goes over how to take pictures, leaving space for the texture layers.   I've taken online classes and learned how to add textures to photos, but this puts it all down in a handy reference.  And a beautiful one at that!

Sarah Gardner also encourages the reader to find her own creative voice and style.  To experiment and find your own way of working with textures.    She has a Textures website to go along with the book--including textures for sale.  You can get a few of them by signing up for her newsletter.    You can also see more of her beautiful images ...  

Beyond Layers Day 100 : Cuppa Challenge

 

For today's lesson, Kim challenged us to make or take a shot composed with a cup, a book and 1 other accessory of our choosing.   We also were to include her recommended textures, offered with this lesson.  I picked Jerry Apps' Barns of Wisconsin book, the red barn mug, and the Red Barn Quilt (Raspberry Cordial at my house).  I thought these 3 items made a nice trio.

Here's the simple photo processing :
Layer 1) Photo cropped and straightened.
Layer 2) Kim's Calamity Texture - Multiply blend mode at 100% opacity
Layer 3) Copy Layer 2 - Soft Light blend mode at 43%
Layer 4) Kim's Chaos Texture - Multiply blend mode at 40%
Layer 5) Color Boost and Vignette

Here's a slightly wider shot, showing more of the book cover.