Sunday, April 30, 2023

Green Pony 2023


I purchased a Wacom tablet to help me create better images in my computer, but it turns out I like drawing with my bar of soap aka the mouse better.  Working with a mouse and a screen is difficult for me, with  almost no fluidity.  When an image does appear, it comes in fits and starts, coming and going, sometimes with my permission, sometimes not.  The layers of Photoshop are always jumping around, so as I'm working on one layer, some little demon pops up and shifts everything around. I'm also plagued by using a very old version of Photoshop, so that when something goes wrong I don't know if its me or if it's cranky old CS4. However, something does seem to be happening. I'm slowly beginning to gather the vocabulary and familiarity with the tools in PS to be able to make images that have their own life and their own idea of where they want to go.  The brushes are beginning to make sense, and more than that, the results are fun and often times, unexpected.  The colors are wild and wonderful.  As their clumsy conduit, the images are starting to tell me what they need and, more importantly, what they don't, and, as always, I'm listening. 

Sunday, April 16, 2023

Demon Head Smoking 2015


I use Adobe Photoshop on a daily basis, but that's not to say I'm any good at it.  I've taken lots of classes, but the problem is that, if you don't use what you've learned, POOF, it's gone, or at least gone from my very right brained mind .An instructor of mine compared PS to a very big, complex city, but that the only way to learn to get about in that city is to learn your immediate neighborhood, and go from there.  My PS neighborhood is about one block square and I only go out to the corner store for eggs, milk, and bread. With this in mind, in 2015, I went about trying to make my neighborhood a little bigger.  I started making images in Photoshop, in the computer, not painting, cutting and pasting onto panels as I'd always done.  The learning curve was huge, and my neck and shoulders would be frozen by the end of a four hour or longer work period.  I "drew" with my mouse, which is like drawing with a bar of soap, and at the same time learned about these magical "brushes" that would make strange and fabulous marks.  I had to learn to use layers, and not to forget which layer I was on as I stumbled along.  The one thing that was the same was the use of my photos.  I would always start these images with a photograph underneath, and then, just as always, I would use the interaction of photoshop and the under lying photo to build the image.  These images live in the computer, and when they exist outside of the computer, they are seen as archival pigment prints, with small edition sizes.  I stopped doing them because the world didn't seem very interested, but I do love them--quirky, strange--a wonderful combination of skill and blunder.