3SIXTY5 #11: Garden Dreaming

Please accept my apologies for the awful image. The original is too big for my scanner, so I did what I could with the hand held digital camera. My son is going to help me set up a copy stand with a tripod (of which I have several, from the old days of taking portfolio shots with the 35mm camera) so I can avoid bulgy, distorted pictures like the this. Later I will replace this image with a better one.

I call this collage Garden Dreaming, because that's about all I'll be doing garden-wise this year! What's cool is that all the flowers in the piece (and even the swallowtail butterfly) were cut from photos I took of my own garden over the years. The view through the gothic window is the actual view through my bathroom window. I added the gothic window frame, which, alas, my bathroom does not have. The Botticelli angels have yet to appear in my garden, but I keep hoping.

Tonight I attended a performance of Pittsburgh Ballet Theater's Swan Lake, and got to see my ballet assemblage box with the other works in the exhibit. It's amazing the spectrum of ideas and interpretations that the artists came up with for transforming pointe shoes into works of art.

The Bad with the Good, and vagaries of scanners & digital cameras

KC Willis once asked why several of us who had signed up for her Marketing Mindset online workshop, were so into Artists Trading Cards, since they couldn't be sold. I've discovered another reason why I like them, along with the online camaraderie of ATC swaps:  they are great practice for working quickly on larger projects, as I realized when I embarked on 3SIXTY5, my collage a day project.

Here is collage #4, entitled "Aboriginal Apollo" (which I was too tired to post last night.) I was playing around with an image printed on translucent vellum. Laid atop a primitive sun motif, the rays and dots on the face made me think of aborigine tattoos. However, on the whole I think the final result is NOT a success! But I ain't gonna do it over, so here it is, garish, blobby mess that it is. Gotta take the bad with the good!

The image above is a digital camera shot, and now that the weather is improving, I will take digipix of my collages instead of scanning them. I have a Canon MP560 printer/scanner/copier, and unfortunately I'm not thrilled with it. I don't expect it to produce the same results as the color laser printers at Kinko's, but I do expect the scanner to work at least as well as others I've had, which it doesn't. One of it's drawbacks, is that you cannot make color adjustments while scanning, you can only lighten, darken, sharpen or blur. Here is how Apollo came out on the scanner (with apologies for having to look at him twice)

The background is brighter than the digipic, but what happened to the orange sun?? I would love to hook up my HP scanner again, but I was told there would be a driver conflict. I wanted an inkjet printer (well, I really want a color laser, but we're talking serious money there!) and it seems you can't get anything nowadays but a multi-tasking machine. So there it is.