Sunday, January 24, 2010

Using your photographs in your art


I love photography.  It was the first area of art in which I ever dabbled.  I started when I was 8, and I got my first camera from sending in cereal box tops (yes, seriously).  When I was in college, I bought my first SLR camera and took a black & white photography class.  I loved developing film and how the camera helped me see the world in different ways.  I didn't buy a digital camera until a few years ago because I didn't like the quality of digital prints or the price of digital SLR's.  I finally took the dive into digital with a Nikon D50 (no longer made), and I love it. Part of my artistic style is to incorporate my photography into my work.  Here's a few ways I do that.

1.  Photo panels.  One of the first things I started doing with my photographs was to place them onto painted 6x6 panels of paper.  I usually mat the picture and add a stamped sentiment. The one at left has a picture from a park in Budapest. I find these sell pretty well at craft fairs.  I price them for $20 unframed.  Occasionally, I frame them, like the one up top. For photo panels, I use an actual photo, not a copy.  Travel photos seem to work very well.  In the future, I'd like to make some that are 12x12.
2.  Copy the photo and use it in a collage.  I've featured lots of these on my blog, but you can see two that hang in my living room in this post and a whole variety in this post.  Many of my collages use heritage photos from my collection.  While not actually my photos, I think it's worth mentioning as well.  You can see a sample here and here.
3.  Use the photo as inspiration for drawing or other type of art journal page.  I would not have thought of this before making the clothesline art journal page and getting such nice feedback on it from you all. But now, I think I'm going to do more of this and see where it leads me.
4.  Copy a lot of photos to make collage sheets and use the photos on collage image cards.  I featured this idea as a tutorial in this post and featured the various cards people made with the tutorial here. As a variation, I have also copied heritage photos and used them on cards, here.
5.  Make photo cards.  This is actually a little different than the cards we made before.  They deserve their own post and that's what's coming tomorrow.
I hope you found this useful.  I'd love to hear if there are other ways that you use your photographs in your art.

9 comments:

  1. Rinda, you are so creative. I love that sentiment in your gate piece and I'm not surprised that those pieces are popular at craft fairs. That's art with ream meaning.

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  2. I really enjoyed seeing how you combine your art and your photography. This post has ideas percolating in my mind!

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  3. Some great ideas there. I love the photos on the paper with a sentiment and can see why they would sell.

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  4. Really interesting, thanks Rinda :-) Looking forward to tomorrow's post! x

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  5. Some really creative ideas for photos.....and love the way you combine with other media.
    I think I definately need a photography class......my photos are such poor quality.....
    definately couldn't sell them!!

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  6. These are so beautiful. I really like the gate picture. I would be drawn to it at a craft show too!

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  7. Thank you for sharing these ideas on incorporating photography into your artwork. It's always a joy to see what you've been creating!

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  9. Great ideas Rinda...gonna give this one a try. You artwork is always inspirational...TFS!

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