by Susan Lobb Porter | Cool Apps, Digital Art, Gardening, Photography |
Oh my sweetums, today I wandered in the garden. It was beautiful! Gorgeous! Came pretty close to being spectacular! The plants are poppin’. The temperature was perfect. And there were bunnies EVERYWHERE. Easter Jackrabbits en masse, reminding me again why it’s not a good idea to plant a vegetable garden.
Ever the multi-tasker, I had the phone with me and chatted with the kids while I was outside. Remember the days when phones were tethered to the wall, when you ALWAYS knew where it was? And when it wasn’t a camera?
Well, since I had my phone-which-is-a-camera with me, I not only noticed how the sun did magic things in the garden, I was able to snap a few shots.
And since I’m a painter I decided to throw them into a painting app and art them up a bit. Here they are:
Nothing says SPRING to me like a Dogwood in bloom. Nothing.
Except maybe Lilacs. I loves me my Lilacs.
This is my exhale spot, one of my favorite places in the garden.
Technical Info: All photos were taken on an iPhone 5C and digitally altered with Aquarella.
What’s your favorite photo app? I’m always open to playing with something new. Tell us about it in the comments below.
by Susan Lobb Porter | Art, Work in Progress |
Oh my sweetums…last week I showed off some landscapes I created on the iPad. I said I might use them as studies for, ahem, real paintings.
Mwa-ha-ha! Squealing like a guinea pig as the tears run down my cheeks.
What I neglected to tell you is I have, ummm…difficulty doing the same thing over and over. I get bored.
Let me explain with pictures. Okay, I decided to start with this one.
Garden: View from the Patio
Susan Lobb Porter 2014
The original studies were fun, I could do them all day. But doing them again in a different medium? Meh–I couldn’t get past the ugly teenage phase. The part every painting has to go through before it turns out okay. Kids too.
The ugly teenage phase
Well if this painting has been a kid, he’d be in jail. That’s all I can say. Or I’d be in jail for killing him. Because that’s kinda sorta what I did. My heart said screw this acrylic shit…BRING ON THE OILS AND COLD WAX!!!
Ta-da! Not done but so much better in my head for this. Except why the hell am I HOLDING it for the camera?
Note to self: Don’t do that again. And clean up your language. Quit saying shit and hell and screw. Or don’t. Damned if I care.
Back to the technical stuff. I mixed up way too much color–I always do that, so I decided to slap the leftovers on another painting I didn’t like. I don’t like wasting paint and it was a sucky piece anyway. I didn’t take a ‘before’ picture. Didn’t want to embarrass myself. Let’s just say they were Aspens in Autumn. And if I was eight years old and they’d been on paper my mother would’ve hung ’em on the fridge. Maybe. If she really loved me.
Here’s the ‘after’, still a work-in-progress. I rather like where it’s going, even if I don’t know where that is yet. The painting underneath adds so much depth and texture. Makes it much richer than if I started with a clean board. These are all cradled boards by the way.
I had another board to recycle and more paint. Turquoise. All that turquoise.
Another work in progress
Another landscape. Imagine that!
So that’s all I’ve got to show you for this week. Any thoughts? Leave ’em in the comments below. I’ll give you a puppy if you do. Or a pony.
As always–
by Susan Lobb Porter | Art, Digital Art |
Today was an audaciously AWESOME spring day. Everything about it was PERFECT, perfect enough to sit out on the patio and do nothing but savor being alive. Sun on my skin, breeze in my hair, birds chirping, garden starting to pop…what more could you ask…
It was a day for landscapes. These are from my iPad. Studies for paintings? Prints? What do you think?
Garden: View from the Patio
2014 Susan Lobb Porter
I did this one today. Plein aire ipad. The sun and the shadows were intense, emboldened me. This piece has a totally different feel than the one I made yesterday (arrow pointing down).
Meadow with Pond
2014 Susan Lobb Porter
This was from a photo I’d taken a few years ago of a nearby meadow (not my meadow). The photo was washed out and I think that influenced how I approached the painting. I remember the sky and pond in real life as being quite blue. The Scotch Broom was in bloom, bright yellow and the meadow was thick with purple lupines. I think I’ll do this one again in the style of the first just to see how it comes out. Check back next week and see.
Do you have a favorite? I’d love to know…we’ll call it market research. Let me know in the comments below.
Until next week–
by Susan Lobb Porter | Cool Apps, Digital Art |
Oh my sweetums, today I’m going to share a SECRET with you. A bit o’arty advice. Pssst…come closer. I don’t want ADOBE to hear this but…unless you’re a fancy pants designer or uber photographer, you DON’T need Photoshop. Or even the elements version. Seriously, want some cool effects? A photo collage, some text? A file big enough to print or small enough for the web? Well, grab some bananas and head on over to Picmonkey. It’s free unless you decide to upgrade a few choices and go pro. Then it’s a whopping three bucks a month. I’ve been using it a lot lately, redesigning the websites. The header you see up above? Picmonkey. The sidebar dodahs–Picmonkey. Well, not the mailchimp button, that’s something else. Which reminds me, I’ve finally got Arty Life set up for email delivery to your inbox every week. Don’t leave here without signing up.
I’ll know if you do, I’m a mother, I have magic all seeing powers.
But back to Picmonkey. Let’s play with something, okay. And by the way, this is an unsolicited review. I’m not an affiliate and get nothing but good mojo from sharing this with you.
This little gem took all of 5 minutes to create. Yeah, yeah, I know it looks like it but I wasn’t going for art here, just wanted to show the ease of creating a little graphic using the program. And I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do. My indecision took up at least half of those five minutes. You can import your own photos but I just played around with one of the stock backgrounds. They have a lot of them. I’ve never even seen this one before. And they’ve got special effects too. And tons of fonts. You can make photo collages, facebook headers, posters and anything else your heart desires.
Let’s play with it some more.
Is that cool or what–a FRAME!
Picmonkey, to sum it up:
- It’s free unless you upgrade. The upgrade is cheap but you can do fine without it.
- Large or small files, you decide
- No download to clog up your hard drive. It’s a web based photo editing thingie.
If you haven’t tried it yet run on over and check it out. Be sure to tell us about it in the comments below. And if you have another favorite photo editing program tell us about that one too.
As always–
by Susan Lobb Porter | Blogging, Inspiration |
You may have noticed Arty Life has a NEW look. It’s still a work in progress and you may be wondering why, why would I ditch the old header and move some things around?
I could blame it all on my inner geek, the one that loves to fool with webstuff. The one that said don’t write a post this week, take the website apart instead.
Yeah, THAT one.
I could blame it on the same crazy creative mindset that paints over perfectly good canvasses. You’ve seen me do that often enough around here, haven’t you?
Or I could blame it on the time change. Yeah, lets do that.
But it’s not the geek or the crazy painter lady or Daylight Savings Time coming earlier and earlier every year that got me off schedule. No, no no… it’s SPRING!!!
Yep, spring caused me to blow off writing a post last week. And the one before.
Because in my corner of the world EVERYTHING is GROWING! All those plants we planted last year, planted with big empty spaces all around, well those plants, right now as I’m writing this, are having plant babies and SPREADING out, beginning to take over the empty spaces just like the plant lady said they would.
Plant babies! YAY!!!
And it makes me happy. Sooooooo happy I was out there for awhile today pulling weeds and humming and sipping on some cold coffee while the dogs and cat hung out with me eating enough grass to guarantee they’ll be puking later on.
Note to dogs and cat: Not on the bed, please NOT ON THE BED!!! Or anything upholstered.
Spring caused me to want to spread out and renew myself. My blog. And my other blog.
Other blog???
Well, YES! Remember Big Bold Beautiful Yes! The blog where I wrote down to my soul, the blog I stopped writing a little more than a year ago. After an ugly presidential election that came between friends. After the terrible school shooting at Sandy Hook where guns came between friends. It was hard to write YES! when all I wanted to do was scream NOOOOOO and knock some sense into anyone who didn’t agree with me. So I pulled back. Missed a week. Then two. Then a month and a year and basically forgot it ever existed.
Until spring began to stir things up and YES! began bubbling up in my soul again. YES! YES! YES!!! I went back to it, took a look at what I’d written way back when and fell in love again.
And so I’ve decided to revive it. Expand it. Make it better. And change the look so it tied in better with Arty Life. And since I was doing that, I needed to change the look of my art site, the one that’s still waiting for me to finish, I needed to tie ALL THREE of them together. You can get to any of them through the nav bar up there. Or the sidebar if I get around to it. They’re different sites with different looks. Different message. Different voice. But if I did my job right they’ll work together.
Check ’em out. And do let me know what you think. Here’s the link to YES.
