Fantasy with Anole

 “Wild: Perspectives in Fiber” was the theme of the 2024 Dallas Area Fiber Artists annual show which was exhibited from July 1 to August 10 at the C.C. Young senior living community where our meetings are held. I reworked an image I had created many years ago for Illustration Friday, consisting of a photo taken in my yard of a Fatsia japonica plant with a background of ferns, plus a photo of a Texas native green anole. 

 

After a lot of experimentation in Photoshop, I sent the image off to Spoonflower, as I had last year, and had it printed on cotton/linen canvas. Once again, I have to rave about how beautifully all the subtle color and texture of the image is reproduced. I then embroidered the outlines and veins of the leaves with several colors of embroidery floss, using mainly stem stitch and back stitch. I also outlined the anole and gave him a gold bead eye. Mr C made the fame, and I painted it with the same metallic green paint as last year. 

I didn't really break any new ground creativity-wise here, being, for one thing, pressed for time. But I enjoyed making it, and I was glad I participated in the show. Next year I'm promising myself to do something totally different. Well, we'll see...

Still reading

And still here. How can it be that an entire year has passed since my last blog post? Is time actually speeding up? It certainly seems so, since I can't believe that I am slowing down. At any rate, I have not abandoned this blog, which, according to Blogger stats, still attracts some readers, although I admit that I write it primarily for myself. The fact that it's “published” also motivates me to continue.

 As I have been doing since the first year of this blog, twelve years ago, I'm sharing the books that the members of my long-time Foreign Authors Bookgroup have chosen for the year. The group goes back much farther than that, and there have been some departures as well as newcomers. We have changed from evening to an afternoon meeting time as most of us are no longer constrained by a work schedule. But our criteria remains the same: fiction and non-fiction by foreign authors or about foreign lands and cultures. 

This year we have more non-fiction than usual. Our August book is one which I am reading for the second time. No prior interest in hieroglyphs is necessary to enjoy The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode The Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick. It is a thoroughly entertaining book. As the author says “...the saga of the Rosetta Stone is as far as could be from a narrow tale of arcane scholarship in musty libraries.” There are “...stories of archaeological swashbucklers tumbling through ancient tombs; peeks at the first-ever attempts to set down words in writing; excursions into big subjects like the struggle against death and forgetting – and it would be a mistake to forgo those adventures in favor of sticking to hieroglyphs alone.” The wealth of content in the book is presented in such a lively style to make it a real page-turner. I'm looking forward to the bookgroup's discussion next Tuesday.

 

The Women

Who are these women? I admit to feeling a slight reluctance in appropriating these images, although they are offered free to use on sites such as Pixabay and Pexels, or in the case of the third image, as an asset included in one of the Photoshop Artistry courses I'm taking. There is something slightly odd about staring at and working on a picture of someone who is looking back at you when you have no idea of who they are or why the photo was taken. But I have to say that doing these let me flex Photoshop skills that pictures of flowers and landscapes haven't much called for. 

   

In this first image, The Beauty, the woman is indeed a beauty and I did nothing on her face but lighten the color of her lips, and I used the mixer brush to better shape her braid. Her earring was changed by stamping a bit of a lace brush over a base color. I used a Hue/Saturation layer to change and lighten the color of the yoke of her garment. Then I created a pattern with leaf brushes for the rest of the garment; and to make the folds, I painted in shadows and highlights on a neutral grey (dodge and burn) layer. The pattern around her head was done with several of Kyle Webster's foliage brushes on different layers in different blend modes. I finished with Topaz Impression for a more painterly look and added a Photoshop filter texture. 

 In Mythos, after cropping the picture below her bust and extending the background above her head and to the right, I both cloned and painted in additional hair on top of her head and to the right. Her eyes were enlarged using the Liquify filter. A bra strap showing on her shoulder was cloned out. The tip of the one piece of her necklace that was under the garment was replaced and additional light put on the necklace. I cut out some ivy for her crown and toned it to match the composition. In the background are some barely discernible trees from a winter forest photo. I added the warm colors above originally to relate to her dress which was burgundy, but ultimately I decided to change it to green. There are two painterly textures on the entire piece.

I probably did the most work on the model in Attraction. First of all, not wanting the tattoo she had all down her back, I found a great Piximperfect video about how to remove tattoos. I also used frequency separation to retouch her skin, especially smoothing out her face, subtly colored her lips and brightened her eyes. Highlights were added to hair with touches of rose-tinted white set to overlay. The background consists of two texture layers from Tangie Baxter, and some French Kiss script. The sheer tulle under her hand is from Foxeysquirrel. Finally I added three butterflies extracted from Pixabay photos.

Flower Power

 The Dallas Area Fiber Artists annual exhibition begins tomorrow, July 1. This is the first time I have participated; Marbled Rose and Popcorn Hydrangea are my entries. 

 

Toward the end of April, I chose two flower photos which I had taken long ago. In Photoshop I altered colors of the leaves and backgrounds and found that the conté crayon filter produced some interesting effects. Overall I applied a find edges filter and enhanced that with some outlining by hand. To the rose photo in the background, I also added a medieval-style design.

Then I sent them off to Spoonflower to be printed on a fat quarter of cotton/linen canvas. (In case you haven't discovered Spoonflower, be sure to have a look. In addition to having your own design printed, you can choose from a delightful plethora of designs from others and have them printed on a selection of different fabrics or even on ready-made items, such as pillow covers and curtains.) In one week Spoonflower sent back the printed fabric, and it looked terrific!

That was really only the beginning. My initial plan with to hand embroider all the outlines on the leaves and the flowers, emphasize the centers with French knots and sprinkle some beads about. After hours of work on the hydrangea image, I realized that it would take me way too much time to embroider all the outlines, so I became selective. And when I did the rose, I decided to limit the embroidered outlines to the flower itself. It's actually a bit difficult to see all the embroidery as much of it blends in with the printed image.

I listened to the entire audiobook of Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead and got a good start on Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt during my embroidery sessions. As I said to Mr. C, I don't think there is going to be an embroidered flower picture series. But all in all, I'm pleased with these two.

Mr. C made the frames, and I happened to have just the perfect color of metallic green paint.

Today I took them to CC Young, a beautiful senior living community where DAFA holds their meetings, and where the exhibition is being shown. It was gratifying to already receive compliments on my work while everything was being set up. And I enjoyed chatting with other members about their (very diverse) pieces as they brought them in. Can't wait to see the entire show when I go back for the next DAFA meeting in another week.

Beyond the village

 Unlike with film rolls of the past, where you didn't want to waste your 24 or 36 shots, digitally you can click away (and delete) with abandon. But sometimes you keep a less-than-stellar image because, well, it was a lovely place and you'll probably never be there again. As I did with my view overlooking the town of Château-Censoir where we had stopped on our boat trip down the Canal du Nivernais in France. 

To transform it into the backdrop for this composition, I used Camera Raw in Photoshop, Topaz Impressions and the Paint daubs filter in Photoshop, plus a texture applied to the sky. All this to tone, add contrast and some vignetting, plus give it a more painterly look.

Next, I found a great fox image by JackerKun in Pexels. Jesús Ramirez has an excellent video on how to cut out fur from busy backgrounds on the Photoshop Training Channel. I also used this technique on the two chipmunks (also from Pexels, by Skyler Ewing), although they are so tiny the work on their fur is not apparent. While the fox is looking up somewhat in the original photo, I used Photoshop's Puppet Warp to turn his head and thus his gaze more skyward, and I toned him to blend into his surroundings

The photo of the hawk by Petr Ganaj in Pexels was so sharp that I slightly blurred all but the head to give it a more realistic look in terms of the composition. I also added three birds on the skyline with a bird brush. The last touch after the chipmunks was some detailed bits of shrubbery around them.

As usual, it took me way too long to do. But getting each step, each element just right is so absorbing that time flies by. And I feel so fortunate to get to spend my time doing something that I love.

Crafting a portrait - Lady in lace

 While I hope that this appears to be a painted portrait, it was actually crafted in Photoshop. Since people/faces have rarely been a subject of my digital efforts, it required quite a bit of learning and experimentation and careful attention to detail.

 

I began with this model shot by faestock from Deviant Art. She already has quite lovely skin, but I refined it even more by using several skin retouching techniques from a video by digital artist and photographer Caroline Julia Moore in one of the Photoshop Artistry courses that I have been taking. I extended the background above her head by cloning and also into the areas where I masked out her hair below her ears.

 

Next, I “dressed” her in this Irish lace collar from the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum. There are many, many images of all types of garments from different eras which can be copied and used under the Met's Open Access policy. I first extracted the lace from the background and then shaped it to the neck and shoulders of my figure using the Liquify filter.

 The hair proved to be one of the biggest challenges. After watching a YouTube video on how to paint braids in Photoshop, I searched for images of braided hair to copy and was rewarded by a photo of an actual braid in Pexels. I extracted parts of the braid, then shaped them using the Puppet Warp tool. A lot of color toning and overpainting was needed to make them look as if they actually were part of her hair. I found this simple YouTube video on painting hair to be very helpful.

Her pearl earrings and the pearls in her hair were easily painted with just the circular marquee tool and a soft round brush.

The background consists of several textures plus my photos of the vine with the violet flowers (wish I knew what they were!), all in different blend modes. The figure was masked out of all of these because I didn't want any textures on her. There was also toning on the figure and additional shading on both the right side of the background and on the lace.

The final step was to use Topaz Impressions to achieve that painterly look.

I spent a tremendous amount of time on it, I added to my digital skills, and I'm pleased with the result. Time to begin on the next one!

 

In Appreciation

While other activities I once participated in, such as the Skillman Players theater group, are now but memories, the Foreign Authors Bookgroup continues to be an ongoing, much-appreciated part of my life. And I think that most of the other members feel much the same, which I find both gratifying and surprising, because we are such a disparate group of women in many respects, brought together by our love of reading about world around us. I have enjoyed and learned, and more than that, I have gained new insights into my own character and viewpoints from our monthly discussions.

So when an assignment in a digital art course I am taking was to create an original work of photo artistry based on the theme of admiration for a dear friend, I modified it slightly as appreciation for all my friends in the bookgroup. As the assignment suggested, I did have it printed and have just sent a copy to each person in the group. 

We have already begun our 2023 reading slate with a short but moving Irish novel, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.  Next up is a French novel which I nominated, The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier which won the Prix Goncourt in 2020.  So, come the first Tuesday in February, I will find out the reactions of the group both to my "appreciation" card and to the unusual novel that I selected.  

Here is our complete schedule for the year.