New Activity-New Sites

You can tell I haven't posted here for awhile.  Do you want to catch up with me?  Then here are several ways to do that.  Visit my new and active sites. You can click on the site titles to find my new places:

Digital Alternative Surfaces

Digital Alternative Studio

Digital Alternative Journaling

Join me for lots of interesting information!!

Rusty Things

When in Texas a last month this interesting deer sculpture was displayed by the road.  Neat stuff.  Haven't had enough time to play with the pics yet, but I will be making selections to bring into Corel Painter 12 and create patterns for the image hose brush.  Should keep me busy for days:) Thought I would share some of the pics.

Texas Textures

In Texas today to teach a workshop in Digital Printing Alternative Surfaces.  The workshop starts tomorrow.  Last night I stayed with an amazing woman who I met over the internet years ago and was able to enjoy her house and property.  Taking some time out, I shot these texture pictures.  Thought I would share them plus an iPhone panorama.

Working with Nature

Last year I started playing with Corel Painter 12.  My painting skills in reality lean toward creating backgrounds for my journal pages and underpainting for my digital prints.  All abstract, so I find this whole digital painting idea really challenging.

 Jeremy Sutton has a wonderful website along with books and dvd's about the subject-Paint Box TV.  He is truly amazing and while I am still fumbling along learning from him I am enjoying the process.  Hopefully I will get comfortable with Painter and get enough time to master some of my own ideas.

Amazing Old Door

Last month we were in San Diego visiting our son and the place he was staying had this great door leaning up against the house.  I took tons of pics to use in images and collages and textures later.  Here are a few:)

More of Nature's Textures

Since one of my 1T "not backed up" hard drives crashed last year, I have been shooting textural nature shots everywhere I go to build up my library.  After spending a week in San Diego for Christmas I ended up with 500 pictures on my iPhone 4s.  Some really great texture, so I will start sharing them here.

I won't be back in my studio until the 11th of January so I am really looking forward to getting back to work. Till then I will be using some of these to manipulate into images for printing on something different.  This year I am going to see how many different alternative surfaces I can create for printing.  Some of these images will end up on those surfaces.

Happy New Year!!!

Digital Alternative Surfaces with Paper

Working with paper and paper elements you can create a thin textural substrate to enhance your digital print.  I have included some closeups here from the samples for a workshop just published on KathyAnne Art -"Constructing Simple Surfaces for Digital Printing."

Sometimes it's the simple ideas that can get some amazing looks from your digital prints.  Two of the ideas in this workshop include using cut up maps and regular old tissue paper.  Map details are not in the pictures here.

The great thing about adding these elements to paper is that you can get a textural look from the paper where the map print is seen along with some surface texture by printing your digital image on this alternative surface.  With tissue paper you can do all sorts of little crinkles in the tissue and still have the paper go through a regular pass through printer.  The combinations of elements to define texture are of course unlimited. Experimenting with this amazingly fun!

The digital alternative surfaces pictured here have a spontaneous wrinkled surface.  The details in the first 4 are from a sheet of soft paper that is wrinkled and then printed.  It makes a luscious surface seen in person with a matte soft surface that invokes the texture of the image and the paper.  The second set of more colorful prints substrate is a base of smooth thin kozo paper covered with tissue for the texture.

Wacom Inkling

My new toy this weekend is the Wacom Inkling.  It's a new pen, the short of it is-you draw and it records what you draw and you can bring the file into Photoshop, Illustrator or Sketchbook Pro.  You can separate what you do into layers or just do it by the page as you draw.  I have to say it is really a neat tool.  This afternoon I brought some quick sketches I did into Photoshop.  Then since I was working on an image in Corel Painter 12, I brought the sketch into Painter and filled the spaces with color.  Of course I could have done that in the other 2 software programs also.  I was just playing here for fun and to start to look at how I will use my Inkling.

One of the reasons I purchased Inkling was so I could easily sketch and write while working on workshops I teach over the internet.   There are many times I would like to make a note on something and now with being able to digitalize what I write, I will be able to skip a step. Wow don't you love technology?   Now I am thinking of all sorts of ways I can use this pen.  I ordered my Inkling in August for September delivery, but it took somewhat longer.  This was worth the wait and it was just delivered the day before Thanksgiving, so it is a good new toy for the weekend.

Metal-Texture-Pattern

Here's my latest stash of found metals along with detail shots of a few pieces.  The metal sheet in the lower left corner of the first picture will eventually be printed. The metals themselves are going to be in patterns and textures to use in my digital prints before they find homes in my artwork and textured books. I am loving the surface of the crushed and rusty cans.  This is an amazing eclectic collection of rusty stuff.