New bits and pieces.

I've been having some fun with making things the last week or so. Nice to have the time to do it!

I've always been a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe's poem, "The Raven". This ATC is an homage to that. When I created it a few days before Christmas, I knew the colours on my old monitor were a little wonky, but I didn't know how much until Santa brought me a new LCD screen! This piece turned out more yellow than I expected, but I still love it anyway.

I posted it on a new favourite website, Digital Art Quirks, not knowing that there was an artist there who was a HUGE fan of the poem. Needless to say, she was thrilled to see it (and I was thrilled to have an instant fan! *grin*).

When I first tried placing the moon on the piece, it didn't look right, so I changed it to a negative image, and this balanced out the darkness of the raven in the other corner.

I think I'm gradually getting the hang of this "balance" thing.

This woman was part of my "Rain" ATC not that long ago. I didn't realize it until just now. I really ought to organize my graphics a little better, but I love just browsing through the files and seeing what looks "right".

The quotation is my favourite lines from "Desiderata".











One of my favourite finds in the last little while is a website called Stock-Xchng. Not only can you find all kinds of great (and free!) stock photos, but many of them have no licensing requirements -- you can just use them at will. For this ATC, I took a stock photo of a sunset, and applied Virtual Painter 4's watercolour effect to make it more muted. The horse and rider is actually a picture of a statue taken from behind. I used Google to find a quotation I liked. I like this ATC as a piece of work, but love it for what it represents -- a new world of opportunities for an artist who can't draw!


Altered Rolodex cards seem to be all the rage at the moment, so of course I had to try. These are the first two I did. I like playing with this, but I have to learn to "think around the holes".










This collage was created as a spontaneous exercise in catharsis. The child is me, and the couple in the heart are the ones I refer to as my "godparents", because I feel God gave them to me when it became clear the "official" ones might not work out so well.

My godfather died in 1993, and my godmother died just this past July. It was an unpleasant situation, as most of her blood relatives (nephews and niece, no children) did their best to make me feel as if I had no right to be there. They took my house key and banned me from the hospital during her last days.

When I found myself doing this collage, I realized that I was finally ready to start processing some of what happened. This is probably a good sign.

Each of the items in the picture has a strong personal significance.

One of the things I've been wanting to do for a while now was to make a digital art journal. I found a cheapo journal at Michael's that was just begging to be transformed (and at a buck-fifty, how could I say no?). This is what will be the cover. I will print all of the pages as 5" x 7"s at the photo lab, and then glue them back to back, punching the holes to fit the binding. I'm anxious to see how it all works out.








This is the first two-page lay-out I did for the digital art journal. It might be hard to read the small print (maybe clicking it will help). I think my thoughts on ads for prescription medicine ads came bubbling up through this one.