Archive for the ‘myjanee.com’ Category

It’s a nice, lazy Saturday, and I am cleaning and sorting, and generally playing with Photoshop. This time a year ago I was probably into week four of the first Photoshop class. What a difference a year makes! Thanks to MyJanee
I have been able to zoom with my Photoshop skills. Her courses gave me a strong set of basics, so when I started getting creative, I had already learned a lot.

There are a lot of questions now that need answers, now that Suzan and I have developed a body of work in digital marbling. I need to think about the website, and that needs to be done soon, as Eric Maisel’s blog writings are going to start happening in March, and I want our site ready for additional traffic.

Things to do:
1 – plan the new pages
2 – go back and review Cafe Press to see what has to be done for prints
3 – decide on framing possibilities
4 – decide on pricing of prints and originals
5 – continue to produce new work
6 – revise digital portfolio for submission to new galleries
7 – decide on some new galleries – anything available in Tucson?

That should keep us busy for a while.

I really do want to finish the Launchpad C of Photoshop from myjanee.com so I can continue with the tutorials from NAPP (and my big membership package came today!). So I pulled an old picture from the files from Maryland (many moons ago) when I was Director of the Reading Game in Columbia. This was the group of us in Chicago at the annual conference, having a drink afterwards, with our boss. I’ve already cropped out the table and our drinks, and most of the boss.

First I got rid of red-eye – we all had it. Then I eliminated the owl picture from the background, and finally got rid of the boss we all hated. Some nice tools….

Okay, so I couldn’t stop. This one is two gradients – chrome and a blue/yellow/red – which I offset by 50 on both horizontal and vertical. You can see the offset but I like it – gives a better flow than without the offset. I also took the opacity on both layers down to about 70%. I applied several filters – noise, crosshatch, and something else. Then I finished it up with a liquify – and I like the effect – not so much as a pattern to be repeated, but as a small work of art.

So I played some more today to try to come up with something that does more with linking and gradients. I must confess gradients are still a puzzlement – I keep getting weird colors. I am pleased, however, with the sky gradient in this piece. And I am having trouble with getting the grass brushes to be the greens I want instead of a series of mottled colors.

With this piece – Ocotillo – an abstract look at the almost dead-looking cactus that doesn’t bloom until rainy season – seems to be a cross with autumn. Oh well, it’s my vision! I linked the veins with the flowers – mostly. I had each flower (mostly) on a separate layer – except for the one falling, which got connected with one of the others. I do have a better sense of how this stuff works. I am enjoying just creating little pieces to work with the tools.

Reminder to me: LABEL LAYERS!!! Here goes –