Feb 7, 2014
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Gracie and I were rushing back to the house after her mid-day potty break. More likely, I was rushing to get back to website building, email answering, or social media wrangling… one of those most urgent matters.
As we trotted across the deck that little leaf called out to me like an old woman stretching her wrinkled hand out for spare change. I felt bad for it, being encapsulated and drawn into the icy depths below.
The way I see it: ugliness + sadness = beauty.
It was nice to slow down for a second and just witness nature.
What are these numbered posts all about? Read the introduction to my Photo & 100 Words project and find out!
Jan 30, 2014 |
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I believe a photo is worth a bazillion words, but these days most of us can only afford the time for about 100. I blame it on inflation and our shortened attention spans.
It’s sad to say but if the paragraph is too dense, or the page scrolls for too long, we just won’t read it. Unless it’s an email from your lover abroad, then maybe.
All throughout school I unconsciously learned to stretch out the word count. If I had a 500 word essay to write and, after I got my ideas out I was 200 words short, what did I do? I added things that weren’t really necessary. Don’t tell me you’ve never done it!
I’ll never forget the story my journalism professor told me about a man who landed a job with two words: “I’m concise.” That was his entire cover letter to a newspaper.
These ideas have inspired me to begin a new project! For the next six years I’m committing to 1 post per week. Every Friday I’ll send you a photo with around 100 words. My goal is to keep creating my art on a regular basis and learn to write short. My own little “just do it” boot camp.
You, my friends, are the most critical part of this project. You see, I’m really bad at meeting personal deadlines. If I don’t have anyone to answer to I won’t push myself as hard.
I’ve been creating photographic art for quite a while now, but it’s always been third to the product photography and pet photography that eats most of my time. I’ve decided I want to put my art first for awhile and I hope you will enjoy taking the journey with me.
Update 1/5/17
What I originally dubbed the “Photo and 100 Words” project has evolved into “Artsy Reflections.”
The 100 word limit was great practice in conciseness and how I made a weekly blog post an achievable goal… but somewhere in the first 100 blog posts I changed the rules to 100-and-something words, and then I finally realized that most posts were never less than 197 words!
I briefly toyed with the idea of moving on to a “Photo and 200 Words” project, but that idea quickly fizzled out when I realized that would limit how little I could write. So a new title, with limitless possibilities, was born!
Don’t worry, I’ll continue slashing the wordiness out of my stories, but I’ll save tons of time NOT obsessively checking the word count tool!
New Artsy Reflections come out every week! My Patrons get a sneak peek of new art 2 days before anyone else, and my Insiders are the 1st to know when new work goes public. Patrons and Insiders also get all kinds of other perks nobody else gets 😉
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Aug 31, 2013
For those of you who don’t know me very well, I hate weddings. I know what you’re thinking: Who in their right mind could hate weddings? Well the answer is me, I do, but no comment on whether or not I’m in my right mind.
Well I’m in that period in my life when everyone and their mother is getting married, so I’m at least beginning to develop a numbness to all the poofy, showy, expensive nonsense of it all. But I’m not here to complain about weddings am I? No, today I’m going to be grateful for a wedding I went to.
Nearly two years ago my boyfriend’s best friend got married. We were sitting at our table, just after dinner when the DJ announced a game for everyone. If I remember correctly it was like hot potato only with a dollar bill. The dollar circled around the table and if it was in your hand when the music stopped you were kicked out of the game.
Well I won, then the DJ said with a big cocky grin, “Now pick up that centerpiece and give it to the person who originally supplied the dollar!” Well, the dollar was originally supplied by my ever generous boyfriend so I won twice! HaHa, joke’s on you Mr. DJ.
The centerpiece was a floral arrangement in a square glass vase with a big beautiful Gerbera daisy. So I took it home, pressed the flower, forgot about it, and recently discovered it again. Well thank you wedding for giving me an art opportunity, and thank you boyfriend for being such a winner!
This is the simple equation for those of you who are just a little curious, but if you’re a fellow Photoshop nerd scroll down below the photos for more details.
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When I first compiled these two images I thought I would come here to write a tutorial on how to give any image this opal like iridescence. I was oh so wrong though. Try as I did, I couldn’t get this effect with any other photo or photo combination.
In my Photoshop document I had two layers, with the flower image being on top of the candleholder.
I changed the opacity of the flower layer to 65% and changed the blending mode to color dodge.
Then I adjusted the hue to +11 and the saturation to +25.
The only thing I did to the candleholder layer was change the brightness to -23 and contrast to +100.
Then I merged the image together and silhouetted around the edge of the candleholder with the pen tool in order to get rid of the grey background.
That’s all there was to it, a bit of playing around, and a bit of luck!
