Selective Colouring

I've just spent the weekend playing with Photoshop. This time selectively colouring my photos. To do this you first change the image to black and white and then using layers bring back the colour you want in your photo. It's addictive and fun. There are plenty of tutorials you can find on the Internet to learn how to achieve the effects.

The first photo is of Priska. She's a beautiful dog and belongs to a family member. I've put both images in, a before and after.

After working on the image this was the result.

 

The image has been darken and saturated to give Priska's coat a deeper colour.

 

 

 

 

Another type of image which takes well to this type of colouring is flowers.

This image was taken at Le Grand Roc as we waited for the tour into the caves to open.

After selective colouring this is the result.

 

The blossoms stand out against the black and white of the rest of the image.

It is a fun way to spend a wet rainy day.

 

 

 

To have a look at more images like this check out my albums on webshots. These images are in the album called Selective Colouring

www.webshots.com/user/mazaquilt

Image Manipulation

Today I added another album to my webshots site. It is an album on solarization image manipulation using the 'adjust colour curves' enhancement feature of  Photoshop Elements 6.

I found that some images I'd taken of some flowers worked really well. the flowers taking on a lovely surreal look.

After playing around with several images of flowers I began to wonder what other type of image would take to the solarization technique. I began a trawl through my many images of France and found several which suited the image manipulation.

This image of a pink door really stood out from its surrounding stone work.

This image of windows and old shutters also came up trumps.

This image of an old car is one of my favourites. if you want to look at any of my other images you can find them at;

http://webshots.com/user/mazaquilt

Storm Clouds

Another year under way and another start to my blog. Towards the end of 2008 we had a few storms wreck their way across the countryside. I captured some of the cloud formations on my camera and have included a few photos here for you to see.

 

This the storm front as it began its roll over the house. The base of the cloud formation was black and menacing.

 

The swirls of the clouds as they surged overhead were awesome...

 

and fascinating...

as they headed on towards Brisbane.

This storm was in September 2008

 

Collage, Out of the Box Swap

I recently participated in an ‘Out of the Box ‘swap with my online quilting group. I had to take a shoe box and add some goodies to it and send it off to my recipient. Not content with sending a plain shoe box I decided to decorate it with collage. The ideas I took for a recent article in a ‘Cloth, Paper, Scissors’ magazine I subscribe to. The artist's technique I was following was Kelly Rae Roberts.To begin I covered the shoe box with a layer if gesso to seal and provide a ground for the paper to adhere to.

Once this had dried, the box was then covered with scraps of scrap booking papers using PVA glue to adhere the pages to the box.

Once the papers had dried the top edges were then sanded back with a small sanding block to make them level with the top edges. The lid underwent the same treatment.
I then covered both the lid and box with a layer of PVA glue to seal the papers making them ready for the next addition of paint.

When the glue had dried, an outline sketch of a lady was drawn on the lid with charcoal. The ‘flesh’ parts of the drawing were covered with gesso, again to provide a ground for painting. The wings also received some gesso to add texture.

The sides of the box received the same treatment as the lid. Small inspirational sayings were also added.

Paint was also added to other sections of the lid and lower box. The head and arm details were painted on. Once the paint had dried the outline of the figure was drawn in with a black marker pen.

When I was finally happy with the result the lid and lower box was covered, again, with a layer of PVA glue and left to dry. The final step was to add some highlights on the top of the lid with different coloured foils.

The box was now ready to be filled with a selection of stuff representing the things I like creating.

It was so much fun painting the box, the following weekend a girlfriend joined me for an afternoon and evening of collage painting. This time rather than a box we created small pictures on mat board so when finish we could frame them to hang on the wall.

To have a look at Kelly Rae's stunning work visit her blog site at: http://www.kellyraeroberts.blogspot.com/

After a long absence from my blog site I am back but then has anyone missed me? I guess not. I am sure the people who read this blog are far and few between. This blog is an outlet and idea post for me to record stuff. Anyone who actually reads this, well that's a bonus and I do hope you you enjoy what I post. So, what have I been up to while I been away from this site.

A 3 month trip to France from mid June 2007-mid Sept 2007 for starters, which resulted in the small sum of some 8660 images. Well ,that lot has taken some sorting out. Some of the resultant images reside on my webshots albums at; webshots.com./user/mazaquilt .

This weekend, just gone, has been a creative one. I've ripped paper, pasted it onto a shoe box, slathered the box with PVA glue, then painted, foiled and drawn on it. The result I am very happy with. Wait for the next post to see the result when I'll give a blow by blow account of what I did.

As well as tizzying up a shoe box I also created some fabric from left over fabric scraps and thread then used it to create a few mini quilts, 5" x 7" in size. A fun weekend. Wish I didn't have to go to work tomorrow. I am in the mood for creating, sewing, beading, painting, ripping paper, glueing and creating a mess. So til next time I bid you adieu and like the sunset above I'll depart in a blaze of creativity.

The photo at the top of this post was taken in my backyard a few days ago.

My Day of Fame

My day of fame began with an email from the crew at Webshots letting me know one of my albums had been selected as one of the three Featured Albums of the day. The album in question was; 'Natures Textures and Patterns'. The album was featured on the Webshots Community home page on the 8th of May 2007. It has now been archived in their Featured Albums archive. I feel very honoured to have been chosen for this distinction as there are many superb images to be found in amongst the webshots Community.

This album has been a recent addition to my collection on Webshots and contains the images of nature in all its variety. The beautiful textures of bark curls on a gum tree, the symmetry of leaves on the Jacaranda tree and even the beauty you can find in a dried up puddle. The following images are some of the ones I have in my album.

Jacaranda Leaves

Mud Art

Bark Curls

myspace site

All decked out in my tribal belly dance outfit. This photo was taken at the Woodford Folk Festival on New Year's Eve before we headed down to the site to party 2007 in.

Belly Dance Logan City. This is where I go to learn about belly dance with the wonderful Debbie Larcombe.

Today I decided to enter into the myspace blog world. Not as easy to navigate around as this one but its all a learning curve. This week I started back at belly dancing after a long time away from it. It didn't help when at the begining of December last yearI fell and took a small flake of bone off my left ankle and tore a ligament.

On Saturday Debbie, my belly dance teacher, had the first of the tribal belly dance classes. We spent some time sorting out how everyone wanted the class to run then did a workout and discovered all those muscles we hadn't used over the christmas break.