Pixels and paint

June 30th, 2015

I have become interested in combining photos and painting in different ways. When I was in Tracy Verdugo's Paint Mojo online course I got a little exposure, but not any concrete learning, on how apps or photoshop are used to play with the possibilities of a painting. This got me on the hunt for more information.

I am working my way through the wonderful e-course Co-Lab with Susan Tuttle and Alena Hennessey. This has been a fabulous course for me on combining painting and iphoneography. I didn't know there was such a thing as iphoneography before this course. It gave me exposure and step by step instructions on using a number of Ipad and Iphone apps to manipulate photos and photos of paintings and then combine them in interesting ways and apply effects to them. This is very creatively stimulating as it keeps my mind in a playful state of constantly thinking about combinations of visual images.

Here are some of my very rough attempts with this. As you can see there are no limits to the worlds you can create with this process.

This was a painting I did then photographed and ran it through a few apps to play with color and added text.

This was a fun photo montage from my iphone camera roll of a sunset in Miami, a fish in an aquarium, and view out a airplane window.











This photo is a collage from
my iPhone camera roll
of a dove and a tree and out
an airplane window. I like
the Jack and beanstalk quality of it.

I mostly used Image Blender app to make these. There is an e-course coming up in September called Paint and Pixels that I will be taking that I hope will help me take this exploration further.

The Ellie on my Garage

June 29, 2015

I mentioned I have an elephant, almost life-size, painted on my garage. I bought my house in 2012, after a divorce. I was ready to really make the place mine and express myself through my home, my garden and this crazy idea of painting an elephant on the garage. The garage is on a alley and the big wall of the garage faces the back of my house in my backyard.

I was really nervous about it. I wasn't sure I could do it. The neighbors would see it. What if it was a disaster. I'd never painted before and I'd certainly never painted anything this big. I'm a physical therapist and work with lots of wise and creative older women. I was speaking to one of my patients about this idea and she encouraged me, and brilliantly solved the problem of how to paint something giant when you are right on top of it. She loaned me an overhead projector. It worked beautifully.

I made an elephant drawing on acetate paper and projected it up on the garage at night- got it where I wanted it and traced the shape on the garage. Voila!

Once I got into it I had a blast painting. I just picked out a bunch of house paints in the smallest quantity I could and went to work. I worked with about 7 paint colors total.

One day I was painting and firemen came into the backyard. I had been making hummingbird food on the stove and forgot about it. I had my iPod ear buds in and never heard the alarm going off in the house. The sugar water on the stove burned down to nothing and there was smoke everywhere but luckily no fire.

Here is the garage before and after.

The Beginning

June 28, 2015

I was surfing around the web and came across Elizabeth Gilbert's facebook page in January. She, of course wrote Eat, Pray, Love and the book I love even more, The Signature of All Things. 

Elizabeth had this great photo on her page that I fell in love with immediately. Here it is:

I love elephants and it has always been my ambition to have a life-size topiary elephant in my front yard. I haven't yet accomplished this but I think I have created the second best thing- an almost life-size elephant painted on my garage in the backyard. More on that later.

It turns out the pic Elizabeth posted was painted by Tracy Verdugo. Tracy is an artist in Australia who does artist e-courses and in-person courses all over the world. It was January of this year. I had never painted a canvas before... only a garage. I had been wanting to integrate more creativity into my life for a number years. I kept thinking about taking the Drawing from the Right Side of your Brain class at the local college. But then I saw Tracy's work and decided I would take one of her courses.

She had a course offered in Albuquerque, where I live, coming up in the Spring. It was full. I decided to check into the e-course. I signed up. It was life-changing, amazing, beautiful, supportive and put me on a path in my life that I would have never imagined. The class opened my brain to a whole different way of seeing and processing and being in the world. The changes in my life have been amazing and unexpected.

So here I am. I love to write. I want to write about this process. I hope you will come along.