Photo of The Week 2010

I have decided one of my goals this year is to have a Friday photo of the week [POTW]. A bit like a year Quilt but with photos instead. These photos will simply be images I like and want to share.

Friday 1st January.

My first image for the first Friday of January is one I took at Virginia Lakes Reserve at Whanganui [Wanganui] in New Zealand while visiting in September 2009. The art piece is called, Compressione Curiosa by artist Fiona Mackinnon.

Friday 8th January.

This photo I took in my back yard after a spell of rain. I like the illusions of ‘other worlds’ that reflections conjure up.

Friday 15th January.

This image is another I took at Victoria Lakes Reserve. I took several photos of the swan and like the coyness of the swan in this image.

2010 , the start of a new year.

Now I haven’t written here for a long time but then not many follow my blog so no problem. This is my space to just muse.

This box I decorated before Christmas but I’ll come back to it later in this post.

This year I have decided to get back on the fitness wagon. My goal is to do Cycle Queensland in September which is a nine day cycling tour around some part of Queensland. The countryside we will be cycling around is from Yeppoon to Rockhampton, Mount Morgan, Biloela, Monto, Eidsvold, Mount Perry, Gin GIn and finishing in Bundaberg. The days cycling ranges from 53km to 104km.

Anyhow in an effort to get my fitness level up I have begun to walk and cycle again. I had a great start and have been sticking little stars on the calendar for each day I’ve exercised [7 days in a row!]. I’ve been doing 5.5 kms walks and one bike ride of 14kms. All was going well until I decided to jog on my walk on Monday afternoon. Wrong!! It flared up an injury I did to it in September 2009 so the last few days I have been nursing a fat knee back to normality. To help reduce the swelling/ fluid sitting in a pocket above my patella I have been  icing it and using an old horse remedy [well I am a bit of an old nag] recommended to me by one of my work colleagues. The gist of it is to pack a hand full of washing soda onto a pad then wrap your knee in it and leave it on overnight. The washing soda draws out the fluid and in the process reduces the swelling. Does it work? Yes it does but it needs to be repeated over a few nights.

I will not be attempting to jog again ,not for a while anyway, instead I will concentrate on walking and cycling.

Now enough raving about my knee back to the image at the start of this post, here’s close up image to remind you what it was…

At work we have a Secret Santa exchange, gift to the value of $20, my recipient wanted Christmas Decorations so I bought plain baubles and tizzied them up. After finishing them I wanted to put them into a box and took one of the label boxes from work, which normally get tossed after the labels come out, and decorated it with my collection of hand made papers [which I made some time ago for some collage art]. The gist of this is once I had finished the box I couldn’t part with it and ended up nipping down to cheapie shop and buying a box for the Secret Santa baubles instead.

This the box with the lid bit open.

The lid open and some of my xmas decorations inside.

The top of the box.

Another close up of the lid.The paper I use is art tissue which I have stained [coloured] and then printed designs on the top. The paper is torn into bits and glued down with PVA glue. The box had a base coat of red tissue paper [ see inside of box image] then layered with my hand made papers. The dimension of the box is the size of an A4 sheet of paper.

I enjoy this type of  collage art and the end object becomes a decorative and useful object plus I have recycled something which would have been tossed out.

Now I guess that’s enough for the moment time for a cuppa and breakfast.

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.