Happy New Year -- a look back at vintage photos!

Happy New Year, everyone! As I close out '07, I am looking forward to new artistic endeavors and equipment/software to inspire and motivate me all year long. I just purchased a new scanner (Canon 8800F) and am getting fullblown Photoshop for the first time. (I have been using Elements all this time, but it has been wonderful and sufficient.)

In addition, I recently acquired some new (old) family photos, plus my daughter gave me some delightful images from her shopping trip to an antique store in PA, and I will share those at a future time. Now I will quickly post a wonderful shot of my grandmother Nana when she was a child. (She doesn't look too happy in this shot!) I look forward to using this in some restoration work and some art pieces!



Everyone have a marvelous and safe New Year's Eve, and a prosperous and artistic 2008.

Sincerely,
Lynda

One week of art and anticipation...

Here we are, one week and a couple of days until Christmas. I am finally finishing my cards. I used the poinsettia photo I took in Texas, Photoshopped it a bit, and printed in in PrintShop for ease of use. I embossed some simple images on the envelopes -- snowflakes on some, trees on others -- and they will be off tomorrow! My last package to out of state folks was sent Friday, and I have only some immediate family to finish wrapping gifts for. Whew.



I put out my Dickens village this year -- but put it under the tree -- and I'll never be sorry I did it this way! I have enjoyed it so much! My mother gave me a new piece, the "Victorian University" and it is the centerpiece.

Love and joy to all...I'll be writing more later on this week!

Lynda

Art is in what the day brings

Yesterday I flew back to North Carolina from Texas. As we took off from Dallas, it hardly seemed possible that I had been there for nearly a week, and that I went to be there for my mother and siblings after the death of my father. What I remembered most were the stories we told, the music we sang and heard, and the flowers.



Advent is upon us, and Daddy's new beginning seems perfectly timed with the season. I post here this brief note and a snowy poinsettia, one that I am currently embellishing for an art piece. Next is one glimpse of the sunrise on my last morning in Texas.



Welcome to the beauty of the season. Savor what the day brings.

Lynda

Beauty in the eye...

...of the beholder is food for the artist.

Today I drove down a local street to run an errand, but the autumn leaves slowed me down -- they were practically glowing. The maples seemed achingly beautiful to me today, and as I listened to Bach on the radio and drank in all the orange and red of the trees, I truly thought I was going to have to pull off the road and cry. Instead, I ran my errand quickly and drove back again along the same road on the journey home. I wasn't disappointed.

Let me share a bit of autumn's glory -- not a maple, but a crepe myrtle in my own yard.

Arty note: notice that the leaves in the background seem a mosaic, a planned background that I could have painted before I put in the main subject. If I Photoshop this photo a bit more, the background will seem just that -- perhaps a watercolor. One more photo before I go -- this one I blurred intentionally as I took it, just to see if I could MAKE these colors into a watercolor-like background. Bingo!



Analyze all the colors and shapes of your photos. What seems to you to be "merely" a tree or some leaves in focus may magically transform itself before your eyes -- into something achingly beautiful.

Hope you all found some beauty today.

Lynda

Nana would've laughed...

...at this photo, but sometimes ya just gotta play!



Subject: me
Medium: Photo Booth on the Intel iMac

Why??? : for fun

Lynda

Back again...making art and writing.

Hello everyone! Thanks to the loyal ones who kept checking here to see if I would reappear. Long stories aside, I finished all but one fall concert, went to my HS reunion, saw my father and mother, and kept right on collecting treasures to use in my art...but neglected this blog.

I'm here to say I am back. My friend Cynthia gently chided me for being away, so I promised her (and myself) I would share all that is going on, plus continue with my artistic plans, AND share some good news as well.

Here is an autumn scene from Old Salem, North Carolina. I always make a fall pilgrimage there after our annual music conference in Winston-Salem. The fall leaves never look prettier than they do there.
Sad news first -- my father passed away yesterday in Texas, and I am on my way there Wednesday. He was 78 and had been ill for over two years. I love him and we will all miss him. He was the salt of the earth, a common-sense man, die-hard Cowboys fan, and totally devoted to my mother and us. I give thanks that he was my father and that he lived such a good and full, giving, life.

Artistically, my family is still, and will be, a continuous source of support and inspiration for me. I'll be sharing some old photos of my maternal grandmother, the one who gave us the "book" that was my original collage "heart". I have photos of her when she was very small. They cry out for restoration and to be included in some very special creations.

Additionally, I feel the need to keep communications very strong this holiday season, and I am sharing the photo I'm using on our Christmas cards this year. Try taking photos of your holiday decorations and your home, as well as your family itself. Those are the tender glimpses that your friends and family want you to share with them this joyous season.


Some very good news, in 2 parts:
1. I just found out I received my National Board Certification in teaching (Music). It is a year-long (plus) project, and in hours seems to rival another master's degree. I'm very proud of finishing the process, and particularly proud of certifying.

2. ART NEWS: Watch for Lesley Riley's interview with me, "Artist to Artist" in the January issue of CLOTH PAPER SCISSORS! I loved working with Lesley on this project, and am super excited to know they will be publishing 3 pieces of my artwork! Hooray! Everybody watch for it.

One last note -- I am signed up to go to Tuscany next June 2008 to take Lesley's course, sponsored by Art & Soul, but I know they are still trying to sign up the minimum number of participants. Think about it, and how beautiful and awesome an experience it will be, and join us! Information is on the Art and Soul site. Consider this a personal plea from me!

Back to Christmas cards and emails and packing for my trip to Texas. I hope everyone had a warm and joyous Thanksgiving, and that it is just the very beginning of an extra-special holiday season, 2007!

Warmly,
Lynda

Thoughts after a break...

Good evening, everyone! I have taken a small break from blogging, but am back. I am a fulltime teacher in a year-round middle school, and we're just finishing a looooonnnggg month of work, work, work - big assembly, honors chorus auditions, concert preparation!

Our Professional Learning Community is reading ARTS WITH THE BRAIN IN MIND by Eric Jensen, and I was just thinking today about how music, visual arts, and movement all collaborate in my brain sometime. Paintings/collages have movement, color, balance, and show our thoughts or moods. I have been looking at others' websites, blogs, and art, and I am moved by so much of it. I can only hope that something of mine will have a deep effect on someone else at some point.

So I post just one tiny piece of art tonight and I hope that it speaks to you. It is a quote I adore. I used a scan of some end papers of a rare book in my collection in order to frame the quote. I printed this and it is on my classroom door. It is my mantra today, I believe, having just been discussing the book I mentioned, and talking to colleagues about the difference between hearing and listening. My colleague, a dance educator, told me that one child in her last period class answered the question: "So what is the music telling you?" by saying offhandedly, "Oh I don't listen to the music!" Arrrrrgggh. Sometimes we must be VERY quiet.

So quiet I will be. I am on my way to Texas for a class reunion and to see my family. I will be quiet at least on the plane ride.

Lynda

Looking forward to the weekend -- make art!

It's Thursday night. I'm tired but I need to do some washing. My wonderful housekeeper is coming tomorrow, and I know that by the time I drag myself in the door tomorrow evening, I'll be tired, but oh, so glad to see the squeaky clean kitchen and everything else in its place. Wow. What a well-worth-it extravagance!!!!

This weekend I will read the stack of old letters and scan some old postcards I have been hoarding. I have one of a Japanese woman in traditional dress. It appears to be a photo, but it has been hand-colored and is gorgeous.

I'm not writing much tonight, but wanted to share something I made last year for my exploratory music class. We were learning about ballads, and my favorite example is "One Tin Soldier", so I made a poster while I was thinking about it.



The background is a wallpaper scrap, then there is some music manuscript, and the top layer is a scan of a letter written home from the front during WWI by a French soldier. I added the text and that was that. Maybe some of my new letters will tell me what to do with them!

Goodnight from my messy table.

Lynda

Where do you get these ideas? Hmmm??

Tonight I'm inspired to talk about inspiration! I've tried to analyze how I come up with ideas, and there isn't a pattern. At times I find new designs upon waking, sometimes from nature or photographs of nature, and some come from who knows where. But the point is that I use whatever comes into my brain -- no, not everything is gold -- but the ideas are MINE.



There are weeks when I don't make art, but rather allow ideas, or inklings of ideas, to percolate. When it is time, I know it, and I head for my workspace. Right now I work at an antique English pub table in a corner of our (big) bedroom. Eventually I hope to have a dedicated space, but this is fine for now. My table has, from left to right, a stack of file baskets, mail baskets, iMac desktop computer and keyboard, lamp, scanner, and Mac Powerbook. On a stand to my right is my Canon i9100 photo printer, and behind me are a shelf and an armoire loaded to the gills with all my "stuff". My collections are in envelopes and boxes and files, and all my papers are stacked up and waiting. My cameras are nearby for uploading photos, and I'm surrounded by inspiration.

Oh yes, I should tell you about the latest addition to my inspiration collection -- a stack of WWII era letters I bought on eBay. I will read them and scan some of them for ideas OR to use for backgrounds. I know I have some photos that would layer well with these! I also know that the stamps and postmarks on some of the envelopes will make striking accents for these new art pieces.

Off to collect more ideas...goodnight from the studio of the Island Queen. Here's to new ideas every day!

Lynda

Thinking about the mechanics of collage...

Good evening! I was thinking...there are so many tiny details of creating a digital collage that I do automatically. I click on Command/X or Command/Z and I go back and forth between selecting one layer and editing another. I'm saying I have learned so much BY DOING that I don't always have to think about each step anymore.

I was asked to analyze the creation of a specific piece of art for an interview, and it was good for me to do so, but it was difficult to take it apart, step by step, after the fact. Once I finished, however, I realized that I had quite accurate a recollection of the process. In addition,I read today in another artist's blog that she was frustrated with creating the step-by-step art pieces for the illustrations of a book she is writing, and I completely understand!

So I'm choosing to post a piece tonight that is simple for me deconstruct, and perhaps helpful to someone for me to do so. Here is "Island Queen".



The background is an original watercolor...swirls and dots in a random pattern. I scanned it and started with that layer. Next I added the Island Queen's face. She was the design on the cover of a piece of antique sheet music from my collection. I used the Enhance/Color options to make the ribbons and flowers deeper in hue, then "posterized" (Photoshop filter) her. Next I searched for something that would be a "natural" border; i.e., something I could drag over and use without too much modification. I found it -- a scan of an old cigar box! I "removed" the parts I didn't want, using the "magic wand" and "select" tools, and dragged my border over onto my image. All I had to do to make it fit was adjust it slightly for size. *Note that I left some areas of the box which appeared to add texture to my painted background.

Last, I added the letters. I had found some antique letter stamps (lucky me!), and I arranged them appropriately (upside-down) on my scanner bed and scanned them. I saved the words as a .jpg file, removed the background, and dragged them over to my Queen! I posterized the letters to give them depth, then flattened the image and signed my name.

Island Queen reigns.

Hope everyone had a great Sunday!
Lynda

Creating your own backgrounds...one idea

Happy Thursday! I had a workday at my school, and it was marvelous to spend the day working with adults! Of course, we laughed and played like our students, but it was refreshing, to say the least.

I believe that hanging out with my fellow arts folks at school is a big inspiration for my art. In the first place, they support my work in both music and art, and that encourages me to make more of each. In addition, I see the contributions of others in other art areas every day: visual arts, instrumental music, and dance.

Today I was thinking about painting. I seldom paint. As a child, I drew and painted a great deal, but I always quit trying to make things realistic after awhile, and enjoyed sort of smushing (artistic term) colors around, and particularly liked new, exciting, and unexpected results! So I wanted to write today about painting as a background for digital collage -- not painting with Photoshop, although that is another great method for making lovely backgrounds -- but rather, watercolor.

Now I was terrified to use watercolors. All my early attempts had seemed a muddy mess. But I discovered Zia's Chroma Sprays. I found them by taking one of Zana Clark's great classes through Art and Soul in Hampton, VA, but I see that they are now available on her website, stampzia.com, and they are gorgeous!



Once I wasn't so afraid to experiment with them, I went crazy creating backgrounds! I layered colors. I used a resist and sometimes a black marker or metallic paint to accent. So much fun! I scanned the painting into my computer and used it as a whole in some pieces, and portions of it in others. I found I could modify it digitally and create an entirely new painting at a touch. The piece at the top of this posting is "Trump"; the second is "Let's Play a Game". Both were made from the same background painting. The lower piece is "L'oiseau". I love these colors!



I leave for two days of state music association board meetings, and will post again when I return. Have an artful weekend.

Happy painting! Be brave. Be very brave.
Lynda

The Artist's Eye and Looking through your own personal microscope

I turned the pages of Nana's Book slowly, so as not to crumble the edges or remove them from their seating in the spine, fragile as it was. I learned how valuable it was to work slowly as I turned and discovered this page -- a girl's picture -- carefully glued down onto the page of lines and lines of typing. The young lady who was doing the gluing must have wielded a heavy hand on this page, for it seemed she left a bit more glue in one spot than she should have, and perhaps it had not completely dried by the time she closed the book for the day. By the time I turned the page, a spot in the hair of the young woman pictured had scraped or pulled away, revealing the word "may".


Oh, my! I immediately named this photo "May", and I gingerly scanned her right away.
The next time I came across her on my computer, I decided to make her three faces in one. I began playing with reversing the image, as well as varying transparency of each image. What resulted was "Three Faces May".



The last time I called upon May to be my subject I combined her face with the enigmatic "May" with some details from an old leather-bound copy of "LITTLE WOMEN", my favorite book. As I played with the text and the outside cover, and as I pasted some of the text from the book into the art piece, I was reminded of the words Alcott chose to describe the March girls' Christmas breakfast. She described the oranges and the coffee so delectably that I could, and can, almost smell and taste them. I vowed I'd write like that some day! I'm still trying. Here is "Pretty Little Woman May".



Now when I am looking over any ephemera I have collected, I put it under my best personal microscope: my own eyes and imagination. You would be amazed at what I see.

Lynda

Using collections artfully

I began using images from my collections -- scanning them and tweaking them when I chose, often simply using one as a background upon which to place another image. One of my collections is antique sheet music (remember, my first profession is as a singer/vocal music teacher). My mother and I were antiquing in Texas once, and we found a treasure-trove of old music with gorgeous covers. I chose one with a title something like "I love you 'cause your hair is curly!". I loved the title (Mother remembered the song) and the cover art.

Using "Curly" as my centerpiece, I modified an old page and book cover to use as a background, copied some old art-nouveau images as a border, and crowned the image with old keys (of course). The result was "Curly Sue with Keys".



I keep, like many artists, folders and boxes filled with the small things that "I might use one day". When that day came, I added bits and bobs clipped from paper napkins and fabric to a background made from the inside front cover of Nana's book. The textures seemed to move forward, toward my eyes, and I found that even what seems to be two-dimensional may fool the eye into thinking it has more depth! I chose another of the etchings of a nineteeth-century actress and used her image to complete "Teal Lynda". You see, I think she looks like me, the me of my memory, of my youthful face and body. I believe that much of our art is autobiographical in some way. Surely "Teal Lynda" is, for me, myself -- Lynda, Island Queen*.

One comment about my digital compositions: I use Photoshop Elements and an Apple computer. I am purposely not going into technical detail here about the use of the software, as there are those more qualified to do that. I'm largely self-taught, although Leslie Parsons taught me some tricks during her Art and Soul workshops. Thanks, Leslie. I'd suggest anyone interested in digital collage check out some of those classes, and/or some of the great books on the subject. Many titles are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

My next topic will be "The artist's eye and looking through your own personal microscope"!

Lynda

*footnote: I became the Island Queen while living on Hilton Head Island, SC (someone has to do it!). A dear friend crowned me with that title, and I happily claim it. Thank you, AJ. The tiara fits.

The beginning - Nana's book

When my mother gave me this book, she said herself she didn't know what I'd do with it, or if I'd even want it. I had been devouring all the art and books of Nick Bantock, and finally I realized that something I had said a couple of years earlier was coming to pass. I had looked at all the antique letters and books I collected, and had said, "You know, someday I will know what all of this is for, and it will all make sense to me!" Well...I opened that book, and had my answer.

Every page tells a story. I poured over this book, carefully lifting and turning pages, because they were brittle. I found enough material to use forever!

After seeing it all, I was overwhelmed. I began scanning pages, but also considering what pages were good background textures, and which images would be the focal points of new pieces of art, and what would look best a teensy bit transparent against a background filled with mysterious handwriting or faded copies of etchings.

I began to collect things -- not that I wasn't an avid collector before this -- but now I had a purpose! I scoured everywhere for old photos, cabinet cards, letters, poetry, and books. I used books' end papers and outside covers as backgrounds. So many had beautiful patinas and I knew would be the perfect foil for other items.

Keys -- there are keys in many of my pieces -- and they are scånned from real keys. I collected keys, spectacles, gloves, stamps, sea glass, shells, coins, antique game pieces, and they all became part of my Working Scans files on my iMac. Yes, I am a loyal Macophile.

One of the most exciting collections I own and continue to build is the box of composition books I have bought on auction sites. I have books with the handwriting of 19th century schoolgirls, one which has that gorgeous script including the lyrics to all the popular songs of the day. Others include poems and sermons. I began buying diaries, but most of them are not romantic and dramatic, but rather list the activities of the day. I buy them anyway, because occasionally I find a forgotten letter or photo inside, and remember, the outside cover is often the best find of all!

Here are some glimpses inside the book...what a treasure!

Lynda

The beginning of Island Queen's image-making

Today I begin to tell the story of Island Queen Images, and I hope it inspires others to create!
"Genevieve's Conscience" is one of the first images I made after my initial "aha moment" at the beginning of this phase of my artist's career.

It began with an old book found in Nana's storehouse -- a great name for a shop someday, I think -- but I digress. My mother gave me this book, given her by her mother. I will dig it out today and take its photo in total for the next posting, but it will be difficult to show how fabulous it truly is. It was an old copy of the Congressional Record. A young lady of the late 19th century, in the fashion of the day, took this old book and made a scrapbook of it. She pasted in poems, church literature, copies of etchings and watercolors, ads from magazines and newspapers, and greeting cards. Some of the pages were works of art in and of themselves!

I began to turn the pages (carefully) and explore what I saw. The textures literally jumped off the page! There were layers of color and line, just the way my mind was seeing the art I wanted to create. I scanned a few images and realized this was to be the basis for my art. My collection of old documents and other ephemera began the day I got to know Nana's book.

Genevieve (my name for her) was an actress of her day, and the young lady who clipped her portrait had saved it and several others and added them to the scrapbook. I layered her image, some ancient music staves, a few ads, and other miscellaneous images, all against the background of the inside cover of the book itself, complete with faded ink signatures of the scrapbook-maker. Voila -- "Genevieve's Conscience"!

Welcome to the Island Queen's new blog!

Hello, everyone. I hope my fellow artists, family, and friends will read and post here. I'll be talking about art, inspiration, and perspiration! Join me as I try to stay up to date!

Lynda