REFLECTED BOTTLES
Here's some bottles on a bottle tree made by my brother for my mother. It made a pretty good subject for a light and shadow photo including some experimentation with shallow depth of field. I like the reflections and the tones the different colored bottles create.

DEAD FLOWERS
This is another photo I took for my light and shadow project for school. This is a place in my backyard where the unfortunate plants end up. Woe to the plant that is given to me that needs a fair amount of attention. Plants that can be pretty much ignored will likely do fine with me.

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION CHURCH
This is a full shot of the Immaculate Conception Church. It was taken the same day as the photo of the church window posted below. I realize that this type of photo has been done, but this is a special place to me and I want to share. I think this is a very pretty church, and will take the long way home just to drive past it. I have some more photos I'll post later that are more interesting shots of this place.

Darkroom photography is definitely an art. It takes time and experimentation to get the perfect tones before making a print. I've found that I can spend loads of time in the darkroom, testing strips for that perfect exposure. Taking the photos is just one part of the art. Developing and printing them is an amazing part of making the photos you've carefully composed true works of art. This photo was actually pretty easy to process.

WEST INTO EAST
This is a local church here in Raymond. It is the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church on Main Street, and it's been here since the 1800's. It is one of the prettiest churches I've ever seen. I took this shot on an afternoon when the sun had decided to stay in most of the day, then peek out about an hour before sundown. This is part of my light and shadow project for photography class. You must full view this to really appreciate it, and get a good look at the reflections captured in the glass.

My first project for photography class is light and shadow. These are the photos that my teacher hand picked from my first contact sheets. The first one, Von Seutter's Gate, is the gate to a plot at the cemetery in Raymond, Mississippi where a man and his wife are buried together. In the 1800's she had died, and he was overcome with grief, killing himself soon after. He was a jeweler, photographer and clock merchant. I do not know if he made the clocks himself, but I happen to own a beautiful Art Noveau clock that came from his shop. The second one is just a photo of common tools in our shed out back.

The rules of this class are:

Only 35mm cameras
Cameras must be set on manual
Only 100 speed black and white film allowed
It is an ART class (NO SNAPSHOTS)
Only outdoor photos
No flash
Students will develop their own film and make prints using traditional darkroom methods
Have fun


Von Seutter's Gate


In The Shed

DEAD STILL FOR TWO MINUTES
This is another pinhole camera photo. We had to do a group project, so we decided to try a group shot. We stood still as possible for two minutes in front of the box. Then one of us ran out of the shot to put the tape back over the hole. It looks to me like we are waiting to be executed. We stuck an empty Gatorade bottle off to the right in the foreground to add interest. I'm the least visible one in the photo, kind of in the middle toward the back, with a little hat on.

PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY
I am taking a photography class this semester, and this is a photo taken with a pinhole camera. It was the first project for class. I have another negative from the pinhole project but will have to make another print to scan for posting. The first prints disappeared from the darkroom.

I really love the look of the pinhole photos. They are so artsy looking. This one has an antique doll with some handmade glass beads spread around on a curb.

I developed my first roll of film today and it turned out pretty good. I hope there will be some nice prints from it for my first 35mm camera project. We are using only back and white film and manual mode on 35mm cameras, and doing all the film processing ourselves. So far it's been challenging but fun.

MADONNA CONFIDENTIAL
I got back to some traditional art this weekend. Being back in school on the fine art side of the campus has brought me back to that soulful place. I have especially enjoyed my clay class, the feel of the cool clay in my hands and the way that I feel when I'm putting a design into it when it's dried a bit, is just something so down to earth that it's hard to put into words how it feels. But I can tell you this much, it feels wonderful.

I decided to do something with a 1996 calendar I had been saving with these wonderful old Madonna paintings for each month. So I did this collage on a piece of black mat board. It's an odd size; 17 3/4 by 11 3/4. I used newspaper and gesso for the background, then made transparencies and tape transfers for added interest. The vines are stamped with gold ink and the mountain bluebird was cut from a magazine. I used a piece of plastic grid to make the gold texture by covering it with gold gesso and pressing it onto the surface.

THE KEWPIE KING & WHAT'S NEW
Another digital collage. Just messing around. Lots of layers on this one. Used photos from sxc.hu again, along with some of my own.

With encouragement from some of my teachers, I decided that since I've not gotten a job since I got out of school, that I'm going to take my art studies further, with an eye toward a masters degree.

My classes this semester will be all art studies to transfer to a local private university. I am looking forward to lots of studio classes, including a photography class and a clay class, which will be completely new to me.

BABY BLUE
This is another digital ATC piece. It is inspired by a documentary I saw recently about a refugee family that moved to the USA from Sudan to try and start a better life. Instead, they lost their youngest child to a mysterious illness not long after moving into their new apartment.

After much research into the death of the child, it was determined that she died from lead poisoning. Specifically, she had been eating paint chips off the porch of the apartment where she often played. The building was old and the death could have been prevented had the landlord simply informed the tenants that the danger existed, which, by law, he was required to do. But instead of putting the money into repainting the porches, he instead was forging signatures onto forms which should have been signed by the tenants, informing them of the hazard. He was convicted of fraud and held responsible for the death of the little girl. Her name was Sunday. She was only two years old.

GOOD
This is a digital ATC (artist trading card) done with images from sxc.hu. The size is 2.5 X 3.5. The finished card for trading will be mounted on mat board and trimmed with gold leafing around the edges. This card is inspired by a contest held on deviantart.com on the ATC Fanatics page. The theme is guardian angels. I took the title from a tune I really dig by Better Than Ezra, called "Good."

SHORT SLEEVES
Digital collage using photos from sxc.hu. Appropriate for the season.

ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR RENDERING PROJECT

This was a challenging project given as our final in my Rendering class. What had to be done was:

1. Find a high resolution photo of a vegetable
2. Use Adobe PhotoShop to posterize the photo
3. Render a realistic illustration in Adobe Illustrator of the vegetable photo
4. Create a seed packet for Ferry Mose seeds in Adobe InDesign using the rendering
5. It must be a fresh design

I had to break my photo apart, and use a gradient mesh on each element on separate layers to achieve the realistic, yet, painted look I got for this illustration. I knew what I wanted when I set out to do it, but getting there was a real challenge. Once I got the color laid in, everything else sort of just fell together. Figuring out that I would have to break the photo apart to get my meshes to work right was the hardest part. The cracquelure effect was applied to each layer to get the texture. I got an A! Yay!

MAGAZINE COVER PROJECT
Here's a project from my Photoshop class. I had to come up with a cover for Daydreamer magazine (my teacher daydreamed this up). The goal of the assignment: Find a photo of a grassy field, then use at least ten major techniques that we've learned in class to create a surrealistic scene from that photo for the magazine cover. Then use the altered photo as the cover page and finish it out in InDesign. I used 11 techniques for my cover.

NOODLE
I went to the local zoo a couple of weeks ago with my rendering class for a sketch outing. I was ill and running fever, but trooped on in spite of it. The BIG giveaway that I was really, really sick, was that I could not finish my delicious Chick-fil-A meal that I had taken with me to enjoy by the lake.

The outing was for gathering sketches for inspiration in developing a cover for a children's book assignment for class. I could not do a lot of walking around since I felt terrible, but I managed to gather some good bird sketches, none of which, were used to develop my character!

In the end, I was inspired by photos my teacher shot of a playful ostrich. It had a game of peek-a-boo going with her while she was photographing it. She showed us the photos in class, and the ostrich really made me happy. So I decided to make my character an ostrich. "Noodle" is my character developed from thumbnails I sketched from various images I found on the internet, and inspired from my teacher's photos. My daughter came up with the name, and I think it fits perfectly.

SAILOR IN TOYLAND
Here's another digital collage piece. I have not had a lot of time for tactile activities lately. Photoshop is something I'm doing at school, and this gives me a chance to use my new skills and practice them in a creative way. This is done with images and photos from sxc.hu. I love retro dolls and toys. I usually search randomly to come up with ideas for pieces. When I found this sailor doll, I knew I had to make a collage around him. Reminds me of Robot Chicken.

FASHION DIVAS TIME WARP
Digital collage using vintage photo from my stash and stock from sxc.hu.

LAYERS, LAYERS, LAYERS
More digital collage with Photoshop using stock images from Getty and Stock Exchange, and vintage stock from my personal stash.

Little Narcissus


The Covey


Tea Time

DIGITAL COLLAGES USING PHOTOSHOP
This is something new for me. I've always wanted to learn how to do this, and now that I'm taking a class, I'm applying what I'm learning to something I love to do, which is collage! Though the tactile, touchy-feely part is missing, the results are pretty doggone wonderful.

No Walls


Superpower

MOMIJI ILLUSTRATION & ARTICLE

This is an illustration done for an article for my rendering class at school. We had to find a photo to use for the illustration, then render it in our chosen medium. I used technical pens and colored pencil for my drawing. I used Photoshop to edit and digitize the art for use in Adobe InDesign for the article. I made the Japanese symbol for "East" from a stock photo using Adobe Illustrator. I found the perfect typeface to use with the headings, it's called Twelve Ton Sushi. The illustration and the article presented very well in class. Yay!