Colors on Cloth

I love to experiment with surface design, using all kinds of processes to see what they do and how things will work out. Heres a few of these...

painted cotton using diluted acrylics with a thermal fax silkscreen
simple sunprint on silk noil using buttons as a resist
painted masa paper highlighted with inked brayer
dyed antique kimono silk with 2 different thermal silkscreens
painted cotton with created foam stamps, and medium with small squares of gold stirred in

I started taking pictures of just the fabrics because I enjoyed how they looked. Just for fun. Nice.

Look for my fabric painting demo at the Meredith NH League of NH Crafts Sat - 6/19, 1100-200.

Playing with Photoshop

One of my favorite late night activities is playing with Photoshop. I love to messaround with my photographs, some of my work, some images of nature (my favorite subject). These are photographs of an experiment with gelatin printing. I love the texture that can be achieved with this technique. For this piece, I used a hand cut stencil of a ancient Goddess figure. In Photoshop, I used the paint bucket to add color. Just click on the tool and a selection of colors pop up. Then click on the photo and the color drops in. In Adjustments, I changed the hue using the slider. This is always fun, almost like magic. For the last image I flipped the image horizontally, so the Goddess is facing left. To do this just go to image, rotate. There are many wonderful and cool things to do with your images in photoshop. Just be sure to make a copy of your photo before you play so you don't lose it and experiment, press buttons!
 

Colors on the Brain

As artists, color is SUPER  important! I once had a discussion with a musician comparing the 7 notes and 7 colors- each vibrating at a different frequency. I believe we actually resonate with certain colors. As I go through my life, I have color constant favorites and others pop up as time goes on. I suspect we are attracted to the color we need at the moment we need it.  There are even color tests and books about the subject. For instance, we can be green with envy, environmentally green, green as in a newbie, it can be hard to be green (Kermit), we all want green backs, etc. Color can also affect us adversely. Red walls in restaurants are designed to help us chow our food faster. 

The colors you use when you make art could be seen as a journalistic color map of your life. Go back and review your work and let me know what you think!

Detail from 1995 era 'Perception is Reality'