Play Up!

This week one of my artist, client, friends shared an email with me featuring a blog post. The post incorporates a quote- “If you want to improve your game, make sure the person on the other side of the net is better than you. Play up.” This is not only true in sports, it's true in almost everything an especially in art.

Artists ask me all the time about—finding their voice. My first thought is they have to want to do the work. Many times crafters travel from one workshop to another learning some great techniques, but never work it enough to make it their own. In the 90's a truly great artist gave me some of the best advice ever. She said you learn a technique- go back to your studio and use it over and over and over. Do a piece and another and another and another until what you learned evolves into your own work. The first year she shared that advice I created 125 pieces from a technique I had learned. That was the beginning of an inspiring and eventful art career.

Playing up! is a good way to advance your art game. You don't have to change what you are doing in art in a major way. Just consider how you work, where would you like to be in your art and make it happen. Read about marketing, showing, selling and creating art. 

For the actual blog post on ArtsyShark by Carolyn Edlund- click here

An Interesting Way to Use Crochet!

Awhile ago my husband and I were walking around a shopping center in Scottsdale Arizona. Someone had added crochet elements to the lights on one street of the Center. Check this out—of course with the hot season starting soon I can imagine what will happen to these:)

Love this, though, could be a wonderful outdoor installation with yarns that can withstand the weather better.

How to Create a Pattern from an Image using Photoshop

My new video on YoutTube. Creating a pattern from an image in Photoshop.

Image Manipulation with Photoshop Touch and My iPad

Original Photograph

The following layers came from selections of an image that was eventually blended with the original image—all the layers were altered in some way and then blended.

Final image

Building a Surface with Beverage Cans

Getting towards the end of this beverage can assemblage. The piece contains digital prints on beverage cans—looped and attached with crocheted wire. 

Detail

Floral Play

 Original Photograph

  

Textured Image

Photoshop CC used for manipulation—

Content Aware Fill

Separating pieces of the image by selections

Texturing the selections with Layer Styles>Contour and/or Texture

Brightness/Contrast

Printed Cheesecloth

Digital print on cheesecloth. The cheesecloth was lightly felted with some wool to build up the texture. This is among some of the tests I am doing to decide what I want to pursue. Felt is an amazing surface when digitally printed. 

Click here for the blog post showing before and after on the felts.

Toronto 2013

Having breakfast with a friend.

Tiny Squares

These tiny squares from digitally printed beverage cans are on their way to a larger piece. The spontaneity of their cluster is beautiful in itself.

Synthetic Textures

Original art by KathyAnne White. 

detail picture

Digital printing on synthetic fabric. Three layers are shrunk and crinkled when melted. The layers are put together with wire pieces piercing through the synthetic fabric—Beads are strung on the wire an pieces of digitally printed beverage cans are added to the wires. This piece is in a private collection located in Toronto Canada. 

Northern California Forest

Trees and forest textures are the subject of most of my artwork. This extremely textural bark is exquisite. Patterns are created easily from these and used in other parts of my art.

October Twenty Seventh—Two thousand thirteen

This lone sunflower is growing close to my studio on our property. It probably took it some time to grow this tall. Yet in my focus to work on my art pieces— my time has been short in enjoying my surroundings. It was a good reminder for me.

Draw a Stickman app

My purchases of apps are consistent especially these digital magazines that come out of England — Digital Artist is one of them.  Actually they have stopped publishing that particular magazine, but the past issues are available digitally on the iPhone and iPad. There are lots of other magazines by this company and the new one Fantasy Art seems to be the replacement of old Digital Artist.

There is another of those types of magazines Imagine FX that I also peruse and buy on my iPad. Amazing stuff in these magazines and for me very inspiring. 

I am always interested on the various reviews that appear in these magazines and last night I read one on an entirely silly app. Silly but clever and funny. This is useful merely for entertainment, but I am easily amused so I like it. 

The app is Draw a Stickman and you can visit Draw a Stickman.com which is their website just to draw and see what happens to your stickman on their site. 

For the app buy the app or use a free version then draw a stickman and take them on an adventure. The app is available on the app store in a couple of versions. The free one has in app purchases.  On one of the free versions I loaded to my iPad there is an in app purchase option. If you don't use it you can keep playing, but there are pop up ads.

Check it out just for the fun of it. Here are some of the pages from the game—

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!!

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.

Printed Metal Collage

Last week on August 12th at the end of my post I included a picture of a printed metal piece that was just starting.  Here is the piece finished.  It consists of several layers and I will start at the bottom and work up in the description.

When all the layers are together the bottom is hardware cloth as you saw in the original picture on the 12th.  On the way up in the layers is metal screen and then a cut out of the printed metal.  The surface is a digital print that originated with a  detail of one of my pieces.  From there I attached the metal to the hardware cloth and metal screen using beads and wire.  The beads between the surfaces start to give the raised 3D look I want.  From there a piece of crocheted brass wire is added to the pieces of wire from the tops of all the beads.  For the top layer I wrapped silver wire around another cutout of the metal.  This cut out was then added to the very top of the configuration.  Picture and detail follows.

Finding Objects

So many things to keep me busy right now. I am writing 2 ebooks, one called "Wrap it Up : Journals with Style" and the other I keep changing my mind on the title, but it will be about digitally printing alternative surfaces.  I would like the digital printing ebook to be an action guide with lots of information and hints about successfully printing fabric and other surfaces.  I haven't finished the list of what will be in it yet, but I'm getting there.  Seems like my time flies by and then I wonder what I have been doing.

Well here is something I started a few weeks ago.  I live on 6 acres in Northern Arizona.  Recently I started thinking that there must be found objects or stuff that is on our property that could be used in my work.  So it started with finding something rusty now and then.  All of a sudden my pile of stuff has grown quite a bit.  It amazes me that after living here for 10 years I never saw any of this stuff before.  Yesterday I was taking something to my shed when found several rusty pieces on the ground right in front of my shed.   I have probably have stepped on them many times and just noticed them.

Then sometimes I think what was left here over hundreds of years, how many people passed through here and dropped things or camped and enjoyed the land. Oh well here is some of the things that I will use but I have no idea how quite yet.  There are a few things missing because I put them in a safe place and they are really safe cause I can't find them.  One of them is an extremely long nail sort of like a railroad spike.  

Wonder how long that rusty can has been here.  Can't wait to see what I'll find next.