It has been an amazing couple of days over the holiday. Suzan was down, and we found lots of time to work on our art ideas. For several years now we have wanted to get into doing some digital work with the marbled fabric, but we’ve never gotten far. A week ago I got notice of a deadline for a digital art show, and we decided to start with that. So we spent time on Thanksgiving Day working on two pieces. Man, Suzan knows so much about Photoshop! She was manipulating everything, and I was just in awe.

We are starting with the actual marbled fabric and taking it to the line drawings – generally. Sometimes the piece stays in color and we work from there. Out first piece was from a piece of marbled silk that we laid right at the end of the marbled bath as we were getting ready to empty it. We got a great print, and it became an even greater piece of digital art.

We discovered that when we both say “ah” at the same time, that we are on the right track. This first piece came along pretty well – only about two hours working on it. The second piece – we did a lot of playing around until we decided to add fish. I learned a lot about the pen tool, so that lesson finally made more sense. I plan to join NAPP this weekend so I can have access to all those tutorials and new freebies. This second piece works very well, as the fish give it a nice movement to it.

The third piece on Friday took lots more time – we kept playing around with all kinds of filters – finally adding a few raised circles and then we were on to something. We are now planning to get together in Phoenix each month to work on pieces. With the ones that we saved, we are developing a small body of work if someone wants to see – thinking of the gallery in Prescott. And when I finally get Contribute, I will be able to continue with tag and add Betty into the mix – she has a great artistic eye, and on Saturday she helped us determine which of the ones we were actually going to submit. Now I get to go through the art entries and find other shows for us.