Collage

Trying my hand at a bit of collage again.  I have been surfing flickr and been very inspired so thought I would try something a bit different:

More Olympics

I have had such an astonishing time at the Olympics.  I am afraid my blog has been totally neglected but now I hope I will have time to catch up.  I have seen hockey, swimming, athletics and show-jumping.  Phew, I am exhausted but ecstatic.  If you ever get the chance to attend the Olympic games in your own country DO NOT HESITATE!

Here are some pictures but I will be adding to them over the next couple of days.

This is the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in the Olympic Park which is a sculpure as well as an observation tower. It is quite impressive especially at night when it glows red:

On the evening that I went to the athletics here are some events that I saw:  Usain Bolt getting his 100m gold medal, the finals of the polt vault and the ladies steeple chase.

Trogan

Do I love birds, or do I love birds!  My husband took the picture in Costa Rica and this is my photo manip.

Digital Rendering of Paper Collage

I did this paper collage some time ago and thought I would scan it in and digitally combine it with text and pictures to make it more interesting:

More Digital Collage

Newspaper Collage

I love books - its one of my weaknesses - and while looking for another book I came across Nita Leland's book  New Creative Collage Techniques and couldn't resist buying it.  If you have her previous book its almost the same so not worth getting but I didn't so I just loved it.

The first project shows 2 newspaper collage, one by the author and the other by Gretchen Bierbaum.  I want to try my hand at a proper paper collage but as usual couldn't resist trying to create one in Photoshop Elements.

Holiday Journal No.5

My next stop was Plettenberg Bay which is one of my most favourite places in the whole world.  We stay in a golf complex called Goose Valley and fall out of bed and onto the golf course.  It has beautiful beaches and some special places to eat, such as the Look-out Restaurant which is a casual restaurant right on the water with excellent food and service.  Then there's Emily Moon which has the most stunning vista and decor and even though the food can be quite average I just think it's worth it for the atmosphere.

There is absolutely loads to see around Plett and two of my favourite places to go to are Monkeyland and the Birds of Eden.  I never tire of going to them.  Monkeyland is a sanctuary for monkeys who have been pets and are reintroduced into the wild and Birds of Eden is the largest free flight aviary in the world being a two hectare dome which again houses birds which have been brought up in captivity.  In Monkeyland you can only tour around the sanctuary with a guide to protect the monkeys and each guide has wonderful and interesting stories about the monkeys that are there.  Birds of Eden is situated in a gorge of indigenous forest and has wonderful canopy walkways.

So for my next collages it had to be the monkeys and the birds:

  For the bird picture I have tried to choose birds of South Africa with the exception of the Hartlaub Turaco which comes from north-east Africa.  The picture includes the Knysna Turaco (left-top: indigenous to this area), the Grey Crowned Crane, the Spotted Thick-knee, Hartlaub's Turaco and in the middle the Cape Glossy Starling.  The three highlighted birds are the one's we have seen in the wild as well during our holiday.  Being a golfer and a lover of birds is a marriage made in heaven.  Golf courses are wonderful habitats for birds and the birds become use to the sight of people and are less timid.

Holiday Journal No.4

As an avid golfer, there has to be a picture somewhere in my holiday that depicts golf and one of the most spectacular courses that we played was Pinnacle Point.  Here is a picture looking back at the clubhouse with me, my hubby and brother-in-law.

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:

Touching up my skills....

I have been touching up my skills in preparation for a class I'm giving so thought I might try some vintage photographs:

Photoshop Collage

Took some of my pictures from the Royal Holloway visit and made a collage:

Creative Internet Sites: 1

Did you know that there are quite a few wonderful internet sites which enable you to draw and paint and create?

This week I am going to go through some sites that I use to add to my collages and pictures.  The first site I have chosen is Wordle.  This is a fun site which rearranges words and creates a collage of words.  You can change the fonts, colours and layout.  By clicking the randomise button you can just try a random mix.

The first thing you do is go to Wordle and add the words you want to use.  I took one of my holiday pictures and decided to make a scrapbook page.

Here is the Wordle screen.  If you repeat a word a number of times, this word becomes more prominent in the grouping so here I have added holiday 3 times and relax twice:

Now click Go and see how it arranges the text for you and each time you press Randomise it will give you a different arrangement.  Here are some of mine:

Now getting the arrangement into Photoshop Elements is a little tricky because there is no way of saving the result.

So here are the steps for getting it into PE (I am afraid this is for the PC - search online to see the process for getting a screen print on the MAC):

1. Make sure the internet page you are viewing is the one you want to copy and is maximised.
2. At the top of your keyboard there is a key called Prt Scr.  Press this key.  It makes a screen print.
3. Now open Photoshop Elements and select from the menu File>New>Image from Clipboard.
4. Crop the image to just the words by selecting from the menu Image>Crop and then resize the box to include only the text.
5. Voila, you can now save this.

These are the picture files I used to make my scrapbook page.  Instead of a flower I could have used cut out pictures of me and my husband:

Here are some sample pages I created with this:

Sunbury Collage

My intention today was to start sewing my salmon/grey bag for my outfit but realised that I probably needed to do just one more print to add to my existing printed fabric so decided I would wait until I had a batch of fabric printing to do.

So I decided to experiment with the pictures that I took in the gardens of the Sunbury Embroidery Gallery.  I combined a picture of a wall with flowers with a cherab statute that I cut out plus some shapes and music notes.

Here are a sample of the results that I liked the most:

I added a flower to this one and used the luminosity blend mode:

Composition

I am lucky I am very much an ideas person.  I have millions of ideas milling around my head and mostly get them down on paper but not always.  The problem arises with the execution of the ideas.

As a person with no formal art training, I find composition quite difficult.  Is this true with many of you out there?

Also, as a person who has spent most of her life honing technical skills, my work is often too ordered.  I would love to be less restrained but easier said than done.  So today I wrestled with putting a collage together.  Too much, too little.  I don't know I am my own worst critic.