Having Phun with Photoshop!

Well, Monday during the day was spent at lovely Marcia's studio and of course Suki was there to help me with my drawing by keeping it stable. You can see a new quilt of Marcia's in the background - a really nice variation of her jet trails.

This is my troublesome Bird of Paradise with all its quilting done but still not sitting straight. The ladies suggest I soak it and really pin it tight to get it to sit straight. If you double click on the image, you can see the details of the quilting. I also must add that I have made the transition to using Photoshop for all my pictures.

Last night was the first night of Photoshop 102 taught by the very excellent Jan Klapetsky at our local high school adult education. He coincidentally is the husband of one of the members of our quilt club! He does a really nice job of simplifying this very complex and rich piece of software. I may just have to upgrade my version to take advantage of some of the new features!

Well, scrubbing the kitchen floor is keeping me warm but is very boring so I thought I would present my first attempt at collage with Photoshop! I forgot to do some things like feathering the edges of things but managed to get a bunch of shells superimposed on the beach even with a title!

You can see that I just started my second more advanced Photoshop class and because of my computer problems, I hadn't gotten to practice my lessons from the first class -- I was really fuzzy on layers but think I am beginning to get it with a little trial and error.

Some of you may subscribe to an art newsletter by Robert Genn but thought it was worth posting one of his latest entries:

http://clicks.robertgenn.com/compositional-keys.php

You can subscribe to his newsletter which comes out twice a week for free and I think it is worth reading. Sometimes it has no relation to anything from an art quilting standpoint, but many times the advice can easily be applied to what we do. (End of commercial!)

It is a letter he sent a few days ago about composition but just as interesting were the many replies he got from some of his faithful readers. I thought there were some great suggestions about artistic composition which is my weakest area so I literally read everything I can get my hands on.

Well, will have to work on something other than the Bird of Paradise as I managed to leave it and my winter jacket at Marcia's yesterday and there is a snowstorm heading our way tomorrow so won't be able to get it til at least Thursday now! Marcia and Bill have a rule about things left hanging on their design wall for more than three days -- something about it belongs to them after that much time! Hopefully, the snow storm will be a good enough excuse so they don't invoke that rule!!

Getting Ready for the Close!

This is a constant sight in our house -- Warren's beloved cat, Mickey, begging for a treat which Warren will oblige him with very quickly. He makes his wants known. We have no idea how old Mickey is but we think he is getting on in years. We got him as a stray about a year ago and he fits right in with the other two seniors in this house.


Things seem to be moving at a frenetic pace on the new house and maybe my age is showing these days! Poor Lisa has been doing most of the work at her end as she lives a lot closer to the new house than we do. I have tried to do my share but inevitably it leads back to her having to make the final phone calls because she is physically going to be doing the bill paying. The last few days it seems as though everything I do has something wrong with it like missing digits in account numbers or misreading my own handwriting! I couldn't even get our local paper to cease delivery for a week until the third phone call (first two phone numbers were out of service!) Very annoying.



The good news is that except for the annoyance of losing a couple of days of transferring the money because I had one too few digits in the account number of the receiving bank, everything else seems to be done and we are down to the minute details. There never seems to be a day when there isn't one of those details popping up though.



It will be fun to camp out at the new house (literally as there is no furniture yet) and go to the local kite festival this weekend. I found out that one of the three branches of the North Carolina Aquarium is very closeby as well as a nature preserve -- yippee, lots of pictures and hopefully some nice blue crab at some point as well! The average yearly temp is in the mid-60's so I guess that is why there is a palm tree in the front yard -- NC always seems a bit north for palm trees but with global warming, they may be in Rochester before too long!


Monday evenings are spent learning how to use Photoshop with an awesome local instructor in an adult education class! His wife is a quilter and recommended the class as a good way to learn the software and she was really right! I spent the evening removing people's heads and whole bodies from photos!! What fun!! And I finally learned what a Photoshop layer is -- yehhh

This is one of my daugter Lisa's pictures from Namibia which had a big black shadow on the left hand side which I thought could be improved upon!


We learned how to do cloning and healing tonight and also layers and removing peoples and objects from pictures. Great fun!! I didn't even try too hard and I am sure it could be improved further if I took a little more time with it. Isn't it cool to be able to fix photos though!

I like to use my own photos as well as Lisa's as sources for new quilts. She has been to Africa twice now and would go again without a moment's hesitation. I had the wonderful opportunity to go there close to 40 years ago now -- an experience you never ever forget -- I still occasionally dream about it and going back! Of course we didn't have the wonderful digital cameras back then!