Summer of colour shimmers

Sadly the penultimate week of summer of colour for this year and Kristen gave us a bold pair of primaries with a hint of light

as my photo starting point this week I used a fabulous pattern that I has spotted on the surface of the river as the sun shimmered off the current when the incoming tide meets the flow of the river

and played with pixel magic until I had these two images that I love

I will be returning to these patterns for some more play with other colours

and I had the appropriate wools in my stash so came up with this charity blanket square – showing both sides as the pattern looks different front and back

I know there will be plenty of lovely interpretations of these colours in more mediums than I can imagine – check them out here

softly, softly with 3rd colours of summer

Kirstin’s trio of colours in summer of colour this week offer a contrast from previous weeks by not being contrasting and instead are nearly 3 shades of purple – the grey is a warm one

subconsciously I must have been thinking soft with these colours as I was drawn to my photo of a feather covered in raindrops.  After extracting the image and colouring it in grey and lavender I played with several ways of displaying the feather against a plum background

I had some wool in a similar set of hues so was able to make another charity blanket square too

I’m really enjoying the different types of colour trios Kirstin is giving us for this challenge and look forward to seeing how others have used them.

summer of colour jewels

lovely rich jewel colours for this weeks summer of colour plus a splash of pure white

I altered a photo again and used this one from March as my starting point

and this is what I created

this one I will be printing off and I think it would make a great postcard too

I found some wool in approximate colours too so was able to make another square for a charity blanket to be sent for blankets for AIDS orphans in South Africa

I enjoyed looking at all the lovely summer of colour creations last week and know they will be fantastic this week too across a wide range of styles and mediums

summer of colour week 1

Kristin provided us with a lovely palette for week 1 that is based on the primary colours trio but takes a summery version of each.

When I first saw them an image of Andy Warhol portraits came to mind that didn’t budge so I went with some pixel magic colour blocked landscape

and the colour combo was still in my head when I chose the wools for a charity blanket square

I’ll try to keep up this second aspect as long as I have the wool colours.

Loving the variety of artistic mediums people use in summer of colour, you can check them out on on Twinkle, Twinkle

Reflective collage of pixel magic

Bonnie suggested collage as the theme for PhotoArt Friday.  I’d taken several photos of wonderful abstract patterns caused by light on the water so thought they would be a good starting point

The I played with using one as a texture on another and after some experimenting with blending modes I put them together as a collage and added an outline to each image – i like the movement in this collage

Then I decided to try the pairs of images again but this time only overlapping part of the image – and blended all into a rust background (because |I like orange with blue-grey) after much swapping around of image pairs and blending modes I came up with this

I like how the lines seem to join together as one image

and then I remembered some digital stamps I have in my collection which create a square collage look (I can’t find who created them, sorry) and tried these as a texture level. The bottom left is the stamp by itself.  I love how it looks as if there is a tiled layer underneath the water

I had a lot of creative fun trying these different ideas all prompted by the idea of collage.  Looking forward to seeing what others have created.

Rocks I collected on the beach

When you were young, did you collect flowers or shells or bits of polished glass from your walks to be used in some crafty piece when home (or carefully placed on a shelf for ‘later use’)? 

Nowadays I rarely colelct things for crafty use or display.  But I do collect photos that I intend to use for creative play, rather than to record a memory.

One my walk last week I was on the lookout for a good dark shape that I could then play with using textures and pixel magic –  I found these rocks

I liked the shape of those rocks and knew the contrast with the sand would provide a good canvas for textures and after some satisfying playing on PSE, I had a selection of colour ways which I put together.

I like how it looks like a partial handprint in some of them. 

What crafty inspiration do you collect on your walks?

why did I leave it so long?

I was looking through images that I created last year, to choose some to have printed for Liberate your Art 2014  postcard swap. I realised that I had done very few pixel magic creations in the latter part of the year once PhotoArt Friday stopped being a weekly event.  I also membered how much I enjoyed creating pieces from a photo, some images and PSE and how much I enjoyed the pieces that I created.

So when Bonnie posted the subject for February – angular and geometric, I immediately thought of a photo I’d taken of railings and set to work.

Why did I stop for so long?  I loved the process and I love, love this image.

For those of you happy to enjoy the pixel magic, stop here.  For those who like to see behind the scenes, here are the ingredients I used

I created the 4 images, rotated them so the top right of the photo was in the middle on each and then cropped and rotated.

I started with 10 different textures – mostly ones I remembered having success with in the past – tried each and kept the 4 I liked the best.

I always apply textures in this haphazard way, waiting until I see something I love.  I was wondering – does everyone do it that way or do some people have an end result in mind and know which texture will provide that result?

Getting wet for PhotoArt Friday

Water was Bonnie’s suggested theme for this month and I have plenty of images of water to play with.

I decided to use the water spray created by the boat when I was on a Seabird Safari in July

I love the sculptural shapes and so I layered all of my images together to create one super, refreshing, colossal spray

I did play with some textures on top but didn’t find anything that improved the image so I stopped.

Looking forward to seeing all the wonderful water based photoart in the gallery.

making the most of a beautiful blossom

After enjoying pure digi creation with Summer of Colour I’m ready for a change in focus for pixel magic play and was delighted to find a new gathering of photo art at Nature Footstep memes which has 4 weekly themes, one of which is abstract.

I took some photos of this flower in my garden with the idea that it would provide a good vehicle for some abstract play

first I cropped and inverted the image – love the shapes and colours

then I played around a bit before duplicating and tiling the images

to create a circle pattern

and a piece that I think would look great as a fabric

Pleased to have found a new place to share abstract photoart and look forward to visiting the other participants and probably following some of the other memes too:  catching the light;  blo-ma (a Swedish phrase referring to macro flowers); and winged.

Colourful encore sunrise

6 weeks of Summer of Colour and then its over for another year, except this year Rinda suggested an encore and chose

and so I had fun playing with words to paint a picture for another week.

My first thought was sunset but then the phrase ‘its a new day’ came into my mind and I thought sunrise.

I was interested in the idea of sunrise as a time marker

I liked this but also wanted to try something with fewer words

again I liked it but wanted a more defined horizon

I liked this one too but decided to try a less flat look

and I liked this one as well but thought I could marry the textures background with the mass or words I used in the first one

I really enjoyed the process of creating several variants on my original idea over several days.  With digital creation it is all too easy to keep tinkering with one image but in this process I started again each time and did not save the layered details of each – when it was at a point that I was happy I flattened and saved so that I could not go back to tinker. 

Thanks to Rinda for prompting the encore and looking forward to seeing what others do with these colours.

Candy apples and Johnny Cash for Summer of colour week 5

You know how sometimes when you are listening to a song that you have heard many times and a line suddenly sticks in your mind that you haven’t really noticed before ? surely it happens to other people too?

Anyway a line from ‘Walk the Line’ by Johnny Cash has been running through my mind so I used it as the basis for my Summer of Colour piece this week where the colour pair is

I wanted to play with layered repetition of a basic shape and chose some arrows to pile up to create a pleasing abstract piece. 

But I couldn’t find a good way to add words so I tried another version

which did work with the Johnny Cash words

and then I kept experimenting

and then used a different set of arrows to experiment with how much of the letters can be blurred but still be read

I’m really pleased with all three looks and still love these words, especially for us creative types.  Wishing you all an eyes wide open week.

Looking to see how others use these colours – each week I’m blown away at the wonderful gallery of pieces created from pixels and paper and fabric and paint and …

Hypnotised by summer of colour

Lime and purple were chosen for summer of colour this week – a pair I do use in combination, and also with orange for the full secondary colours triad.

Looking at the two colours on my Photoshop elements screen I felt they were drawing my eyes into the screen and started thinking about hypnotic concentric circles.  I created some

Then I copied and collaged some, prompted by the tangle pattern hypnotic

And then for my final A4 size poster I used the 4 collages together

‘squaring the circle’ = to find a good solution to a problem when that seems impossible, especially because the people involved have very different needs or opinions

Squaring the circle is a skill I’ve been known for throughout my working life and seemed appropriate when using square collage of concentric circles.

Looking forward to seeing what others do with this colour combo and which combo is chosen for next week.

Hot words in summer of colour

What an amazing array of art in response to the first summer of colour pair last week – I enjoyed visiting many blogs and seeing work using different mediums and techniques. I’ll definitely be visiting all on the linky again this week.

Our colour pair this week continues the bright theme but on the other side of the wheel

I played with the wave distortion filter in Photoshop Elements creating patterns and put some together as a collage

Then I used one of them as a background for some play with words

reflecting on the extent to which we all use words that are very specific to a particular context and how easy it is to forget that this language in a mystery to others.

I’ve used series of words from different parts of my life as well as emoticons and text or internet speak

The specific sets of words on the diagonals are

* Maori words used regularly by New Zealanders

*slang from North East Scotland

* terms in Photoshop elements

*organisations I work for and with

*fiscal terms commonly in the news

* blogger terms

* from my days as a political scientist

*barista coffee lingo

* StarTrek talk

* crochet terms

and of course babelfish is a HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy reference.