Holiday Journal No.2

Here is our next stop, a little boutique hotel called Camps Bay Retreat.  The hotel has 3 resident dogs – Wanda is the spaniel in the collage.  You walk down through the gardens and down a little path onto the wonderful Camps Bay beach in Cape Town.

Holiday Journal No. 1

I’m on holiday at the moment in South Africa and decided that as I go along I’m going to make a collage journal of the places I have been to.  My first stop is my sister who is a naturopath.   Three of the things she loves are flowers, buddhas and cats.  Also, photographs around the house are put into beautiful frames so I went around the house taking pictures and this first collage represents my view of her and her house:

Picture Collage

I have been giving a two day beginner course this week and it's really exciting to see the wonderful stuff my students have produced.

This has spurred me on to practise my vintage collage techniques which is an area I want to improve.  Here is my latest attempt:

Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

The theme for this week's Photo Friday Art was to get out of one's comfort zone and try a technique that you have been wanting to try for sometime.

I have a wide screen design Trust Pen Tablet and I seldom use it although I know that it would give me so many more opportunities if I did, so I decided to use it to do this week's art photo.  I wanted to somehow use the tracing and sketching possibilities of the tablet to give a photo a painterly effect.

Here is the result.  It reminds me of an old dark oil painting:

Here is the original cropped picture:

Here are the pieces of the picture that I traced and filled in using my pen tablet.  The blue lines were on a separate transparent layer and once I had drawn them I used the smudge tool to make them softer:

This is the background layer.  I changed the hue and applied a cut-out filter:

I blended two layers of the drawn lily on top of the background layer and added a free texture by Shadowhouse Creations (man, I love his stuff!):

DONE.

I used another of Jerry's textures to create these two alternatives:

Hmmm, not sure which one I like best.