Staring Contest

Last Sunday, Geeda, our neighbor's cat, was sitting on our deck, looking through the glass door and staring into Kaefer's eyes.

(See the dirt on the window? Those are Geeda's paws; she stretches up the window several times a day)

However, the staring contest didn't take too long since Geeda got a little bit impatient.

And then she got these big pleading, "please, let me in"-eyes - she knows very well that she is not permitted inside due to the Geek's heavy allergies.

However, she always tries - and sometimes she succeeds in sneaking in.

I"m pretty sure our home would be her home as well if we let her. She doesn't like her "real" home very much, the people who own her (and who kindly feed her and take her to the vet) - you know how cats have their own mind about where they want to be.

And honestly, if the Geek hadn't all these allergies, she already would be an established member of the family. She definitely has conquered all our hearts, even the Geek's (he would never admit that, though).

Are there any cats in your life who don't "belong" to you?

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A Painting and a Charcoal Girl

As usual (it seems) I'm late for Paint Party Friday. But at least I have something I can show, I actually finished a mixed media painting in two days and also tried my hand on charcoal again.

This girl with the giraffe neck was inspired by Jeanne Oliver's class "Creatively Made" that I am taking at the moment. I'm learning a whole lot of new stuff there, and I thoroughly enjoy it. In this mixed media painting I played with molding paste and charcoal. The texture of the molding paste - I used Golden's light molding paste - is fun, and I added some pan pastels to it after it had dried. It's on a 4x4 canvas.

Girls/women is a subject I love to paint and draw. This bird girl is made with charcoal, and I mainly did it to practice drawing faces. Then I remembered one of Lisa Wright's girl who had some color in her hair and face that you usually don't see and which I liked a lot. So I tried that and added some blue to my girl's hair and face, some red and yellow (I used pastels for that). It is interesting and I quite like the effect.

Please visit the other highly talented artists at Paint Party Friday - such a wonderful way to see some inspirational artwork.

My First Try of an Abstract

As many of you know, I love Bonnie's Photo Art Friday challenge. What I particularly like about it is that Bonnie's ideas really challenge me and often enough get me out of my comfort zone. One of those is to create an abstract, using three of our photos and at least one of her textures. Oh boy!!! That was way out of my comfort zone - and it shows.

These were my three photos:

I "merged" them into one image just like Bonnie told us in her tutorial, and then selected a filter "cutout". After that I added Bonnie's texture "abstract scratches" in blending mode "difference" at 75%; then added her texture "Monet's music texture" in blending mode "vivid light" at 67%; some levels and saturation adjustment and I felt I was done. I really didn't know what else to do.

Do I like it? Not really...

Perhaps I did chose photos that don't work very well for this project (probably). I wish I knew how to blend the edges of the photos more, so that the photos merge better. I don't like that you can still see the rectangle shape. I have no idea whether and how that is possible. Perhaps someone can tell me?

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Vision and Verb

I'm over at Vision and Verb today, wondering where the years have gone and how old I really feel.

Please come and visit.

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Just enough

This year I'm taking Kim Klassen's e-course "Beyond Layers" which will be a yearlong journey. I am quite excited about it and wonder where this will get me. This past week had been very busy, so only today I started to work on some images for the course.

This week's theme was "just enough" - simplicity in photos. Something I admire and I want to achieve with a good part of my pictures, but so far haven't always been very good at. I looked through my archives and found two images that I once edited a bit (you can see them here and here) and today edited again.

First I did some levels and hue/saturation adjustments. Then I added Kim's texture "awaken", blending mode soft light at 72%. After a brightness adjustment I first eliminated the yellows and cranked up the saturation adjustment.

With this image of a light hanging from the ceiling in a mosque in Cairo I also started with some levels adjustment (this is a scanned slide). I added Kim's texture "papergrunge" at 100% soft light, then copied it, multiply at 74% and did some hue/saturation adjustments.

It was fun editing some images I already had processed in a certain way and now try a different approach. This can get pretty addicting.

Is anybody of you taking this course?

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Girl With a Big Heart

Fridays is one of my favorite blogging days because it means Paint Party Friday and Studio Sneak Peek! I love these weekly get togethers because it keeps me painting and working on new art pieces - or finishing some.

This girl was still a work in progress last Friday, but now she is finished - she's the girl with a big heart. I really like how she turned out, especially since I've always been afraid of painting faces. She's far from perfect - all my work is like that - but I think she has some soul.

I would like to do a painting of a mother and daughter and am practicing this with charcoal. These two I sketched on the backside of some paper that was lying around (you can see the text peeking through on the bottom) - I still have a lot of practicing to do! But how much do I love it!

Please come and visit the other artists at Paint Party Friday and Sneak Peek Friday; every week there is some wonderful work to see and find a lot of inspiration.

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Three

Bonnie's challenge for this week's Photo Art Friday was something that connects to the number 3/three. Not only will you see three of my photos here, but each shows three of something - deck chairs, sail boats and trees.

This picture - originally a slide, like the two others as well -was taken at the beach in Brighton, England. It was a windy, partly cloudy day, and almost no one was sitting in these chairs. However, they had something very optimistic about them the way they were patiently waiting for guests to lounge there despite the English moody weather. The texture applied here is Kim Klassen's "warmsun", blending mode linear burn at 50% and copied once with some adjustments (levels, saturation, brightness).

With these sail boats - shot at the coast of Cornwall, England - I went a little bit bolder. The picture was taken in the evening with the sun already gone, but the clouds were still pink and the mood was nice, but quite dark. The original picture is a little bit dull, so I thought some "pepper" can't hurt. I first applied Bonnie's texture "dappled dawn", blending mode exclusion at 90%; did some hue/saturation adjustments; applied Bonnie's texture "mauve magic", blending mode color dodge at 25%; some more saturation and brightness adjustments; and finally I cropped the photo a little bit more. I'm in love with the color!

Finally trees - of course! Again, we are in the Swabian mountains in Germany on a cold winter day, a very cloudy day I should add, the original photo is just dark. I cropped it down to three trees; did a levels adjustment to brighten it up a little bit; applied Bonnie's "edited acrylics" (one of my favorite textures) in blending mode pin light at 85% with some saturation adjustments. I only used a part of the texture, the upper left hand corner, and I thought how interesting it looks when you drag out the texture.

What I really like about these challenges is that I try something new - blending modes I usually ignore, or playing around with the texture first before applying it. Every time I realize how much I still have to learn, but I love, love, love it.

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