Just a quick art journal page for Glue it Tuesday, featuring pink and orange paint, items found on my desk and a sketch made during a meeting. The journaling reads . . . "One day I will move to Paris and in Paris, I will sketch (instead of doing laundry)." About sums up my thoughts on the day!
Henry graduated from High School last week. In preparation for the ceremony, we decorated his mortarboard with the logo for the University of Oregon where he will go in the fall. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the new graduates threw their hats in the air. His cap caught the sunlight, and I was lucky enough to capture it in a photograph. I thought this made the perfect look up//look down pair for this week. Thanks to Helena for starting this meme.
I also can't pass up the opportunity to post this picture of Henry with some of his friends and their decorated mortarboards.
So proud of these boys.
What do you see when you look at this photograph? Anything at all? One of my favorite books to read to my children when they were little was "My Life with the Wave" by Octavio Paz, adapted by Cowan and Buehner. It's the story of a child who takes a wave home to live with him and the surprising havoc it raises in their home. At the end of the story, the child returns the wave to the sea but begins to dream about taking home a cloud, reasoning that they are so soft and fluffy that they couldn't be much trouble at all . . . The book ends with a picture of a cloud's face, which looks very much like this face which I found recently while gazing at clouds before a baseball game.
When I added item #12 to the Summertime Photography Scavenger Hunt: A Cloud in the Shape of Something, I hadn't thought that much about what types of clouds you need to see objects. Obviously, the high overcast we have on the coast is not so good! But white fluffy clouds, like the ones above the baseball field are just right:
I enjoyed watching the clouds move and form various interesting shapes. I watched one group of clouds for about fifteen minutes as it slowly moved and began to morph into what I hoped would be the head of a unicorn. I took this picture during the transformation:
The clouds continued to move, and it happened. It looked just like a unicorn. I put my phone up to my eye take the picture,carefully framed it, went to press the button, and . . . the battery died! So glad I captured the face when I had a chance. LOL! Have you had any interesting adventures gazing at clouds?
So happy to see so many people posting scavenger hunt finds already. Here's an (incomplete) round-up of some recent posts:
Chipper has this very (unintentionally) funny sign.
Nicky has a variety of offerings, though I think my favorite is her tower.
BoysMum2 takes us to the Auckland Zoo.
Deb found a windmill!
The other Deb has a sweet napper, a beautiful mosaic and a funny sign.
Stacey posted something definitely out of place and her plan for going forward.
And Gail has the best plane photographs ever!
It's not too late to join the hunt. There's still over three months left. Click on photo in the sidebar to get all the details.
Hello Monday (a meme started by Lisa Leonard) . . .
Hello High School Graduate . . . Henry graduated last Thursday, and it was a wonderful day spent with family and friends, followed by three days of parties and celebration.
Hello Summer School . . . two more weeks for Clara; five more weeks for me (teaching two nights a week). Sigh
Hello Costa Rica . . . Henry leaves in a few days for his senior class trip. What a life!
Hello Dog Walking at the Humane Society . . . Clara and I have been "promoted" from simply giving TLC to the dogs in their kennels to actually being able to walk them and play with them in the play yard.
Hello black berries and other summer produce . . . Paul and Clara went black berry picking on Saturday; we continue to get a CSA produce box each week filled with new and interesting food. I learned how to prepare fava beans last weekend. Not sure what this week's box has in store!
Hello to moving forward on our summertime plans . . . maybe a trip to the zoo because there's a baby tiger and a baby giraffe there now, and I hear they're growing really fast!
Hello to more 2013 Photography Scavenger Hunting . . . I am so thrilled to see so many finds turning up on people blogs. Plus the instagram feed at #summertimescavengerhunt is really filling up. I've got some finds to post soon, as well as a few links to post.
What are you saying hello to this week?
It has been about a year since we visited Ireland and Barcelona last summer, and until recently the photographs from the trip were sitting in my computer for the most part unedited, unprinted, and otherwise unattended to. Normally, I would have already printed them out and created a trip album for them.
Of course, this was no normal trip. And the last year has been anything but normal. But still I wanted to do something with the photographs I took. Over our long Memorial Day weekend, I realized there was one day when I would have the house to myself (Henry was umpiring; Paul and Clara went to a blues festival), I invited a friend over to show me how to make a photo book. The night before she came over, I went through all my photographs for the Ireland portion of our trip, edited them and had them ready to put in a book.
After some deliberation, I decided to use Mixbook. I used their "Travel Magazine" format as my starting point, although I modified it as I went along. Using it gave my book a coherent feel appropriate for a trip book. And, by and large, I liked the colors, fonts and graphics in the format. I also like their "Vintage Travel" format and will likely use it as the starting point for my Barcelona photographs.
On the whole, I enjoyed the process of getting these photographs into a book form. The mixbook interface was easy to use, and I quickly got the hang of using their templates, graphics, text boxes, etc. I think the little bit of PSE I've done, working in Picmonkey and playing with the iphone app Snapseed all really helped my learning curve. The paper and color quality of mixbook was good, as was the delivery time. There was a problem with the book when it arrived; all the pages were glued together along the right hand side, so I couldn't open any of the pages! I called the company and spoke to a nice, live person, and explained the problem. She sent me an email with a link to send some photos of the problem and within a few hours they had sent me an email saying they would reprint the book and send out a new one straight away. The new/second book arrived just fine. Since they dealt with the problem so well, I'll give them another chance before deciding they have consistent quality control problems. The book struck me as fairly expensive, though that may be because I made a 12x12 hard cover book with a lot of pages. My friend tells me that it's actually competitive in price to other photo book manufacturers (she has tried a lot of them). Also, if I compared the price of the book to the cost of printing photographs (especially in larger, varied sizes) and all the scrapbook supplies, I'm sure it's much less expensive than a traditional scrapbook.
The thing I liked best about making the photo book was the ability to easily use larger versions of my photographs. It also went together very quickly and will be much easier to store and show off than a traditional scrapbook. At the end of the day, the best thing is that the book is done! The major down-side (and this was probably a rookie mistake) was that I didn't do as much journaling because I thought there wasn't room. When I received my book, I saw that the font was really big. I could have made it much smaller and included a lot more of the story. I also was not able to include memorabilia, although I have most of that stored in the trip journal I made for the trip.
This post has been percolating in my brain for a while, but it wasn't until I read Amy's recent post on her 2012 Photobook that this really came together. I loved how she recorded her thoughts on the process, and I wanted to do the same. First, a question. Is this what people mean by digital scrapbooking? I know the answer doesn't really matter in the big picture, but I'm curious. I didn't make any templates on my own. I just went to the mixbook site and used what they had. I did add and subtract elements on the page like I would in regular scrapbooking, but it seemed much less involved than what I had previously thought of when people talked about digital scrapbooking. Second, I'm glad I took the plunge and made the photo book. I know I will make more in the future. I already made one (using shutterfly) for the half-marathon instagram photos I took, and I will review that one when it arrives. I have plans to do another mixbook with the Barcelona photos I have (once I edit them and find a good block of time). Third, I really like the storability of this book. I do have serious concerns about storing all my regular scrapbooks. But, at the end of the day, I know I won't ever completely move to photobooks. And the main reason is because I miss the look and feel of real, printed photographs. More than the paper and supplies, I love photographs. I love holding them and looking at them. Even good, professional printing in a book is not the same to me in terms of texture and depth. On the upside, I take many fewer scrappable photos these days, as the kids have grown up. So I think I only have a few more years of traditional annual scrapbooks lefts to do. That should help with the storage problem at least.
So, those are my thoughts. I welcome your reactions!
A few days ago, I posted about my desire to come up with summer plans that included some fun, in addition to the projects which have dominated my summertime agenda. After pondering for a while and rereading the links in my post, I decided that while I want to accomplish a variety of things this summer, I also want to experience the joys of summer. So I came up with my summertime list and divided it into five categories: fun; learn; sweat; repair; and maintain. I've been itching to make a mini journaling book featured in Jennifer's Projects that Wow class, and I thought it would be a perfect way to memorialize my list. I don't want to give away class secrets for free, but I will show you a peek into my booklet:
And here are my lists:
Fun
1. Go to the beach: pick sea class; study the tide pools; sit on the sand.
2. Sit beside the fire ring out back, enjoying a drink and good conversation with family and friends.
3. Enter a photograph in the County Fair and then attend to see if I won a ribbon. I really wanted to do this but when I investigated further, I found that the fair is already half over and entries were due back in April!
4. Pick blackberries.
5. Go to the zoo.
6. Visit the Filoli Estate: take photographs and sketch.
7. Visit the Museum of Modern Art
8. Take Clara and her friends to Great America, The Boardwalk and other fun places
9. Go to a concert at Stern Grove
10. Create a fun zone in the garage
Learn
1. Attend obedience classes with the dogs.
2. Enroll Clara in lifeguard training and/or swim aide program.
3. Online art classes (I blogged about these here)
Sweat
1. Empowered Fitness and running for me
2. Empowered Sport for Clara
3. Running for Clara
4. Kick Boxing for Clara
5. Swimming for Clara
6. Spinning Class for Clara
Repair
1. Clean out the garage
2. Fix up the back yard
3. Inventory and trouble-shoot the computers
4. Fix internet in the house and the television in Clara's room
Maintain
1. Dentist for Henry and Clara
2. Doctor for me
3. Doctor for Clara
4. Eye doctor for me
5. Dentist for me
*****************************************************************
Feeling much better about my summertime plans!
This summer, I'm playing along with Kristin's Summer of Color Challenge. Each week, for six weeks, a color combination is chosen by a poll of the participants and then people create artwork, in whatever format they choose, based around those colors. I decided that I wanted to work with acrylic paint since it has been soooo long since I've played with them. I considered creating six canvases, as I have at least that many sitting in my stash but decided they would bee too difficult to store. Then I decided to work on pieces of plaster wrap because I knew I had a large 16x16 piece that I could cut into six 8x5 pieces. But, try as I might, I could not find that piece of plaster wrap. It's big; it's hard for it to hide. I looked in all the places I remember seeing it or storing it. But, no luck; no plaster wrap. Sigh. I guess it's a sign of how much stuff I have that something that big can remain hidden. As I was cleaning and searching, I did find a package of watercolor paper postcards that I decided would be just fine for the project. And, in the end, I'm glad I went in this direction because I found that my painting skills are really rusty. It would have been very frustrating to work on a bigger canvas. Also, plaster really changes colors, and it was hard enough to get the right colors on the watercolor paper. For my postcards, I decided to try to focus on abstract painting, color and texture. In the end, I decided I would also find a summery quote to use on each one. I think this will lead to a nice, coherent collection by the end of the challenge.
The colors for Week 1 were citron green and turquoise. I looked through my Golden acrylic paints and decided to go primarily with manganese blue hue and green gold. I eventually supplemented with some other blues and greens, as well as metallic gold. I started with a rough coat of gesso on the card and then added a layer of blue in washes and glazes. Next, I used a stencil and other texture tools to add more gesso and some soft modeling paste. I painted those areas with layers of green paint. I went back in with a bit more turquoise to unify everything a bit; wrote in my quote; and then hit the high points in the texture and a bit of the background with metallic gold as my final top layer. I'm really glad I'm participating in this challenge because I don't want to lose my acrylic painting skills, and I definitely felt rusty. I think this will also push me to make some acrylic canvases this summer, as well as do some plaster wrap work (once I find the damn thing!).
Thanks for the challenge Kristin! Thanks also to the folks at Paint Party Friday, where I'm posting this, for the reminder to pick up your brushes and paint - they're the main reason I did any painting at all this last year.
The quote reads "Don't grow up too quickly, lest you forget how much you love the beach."
Posts
