Art by the Inch starts today but, inspired by it, I did some stuff in October
which I will now subject you to.
I've made three Christmas cards and one birthday card, all with a blue squares theme. I intend making more in November. I have a bunch of blue squares made up, so hopefully some of them will be a matter of cutting, choosing and sticking, but I imagine I'll have to make more for the card designs to work, plus I'll probably do some other colours. I'm also thinking of making another birthday card or too, and maybe a wedding card, using the squares idea again.
I used an old magazine (Eve, Sept 2005, for the curious) to make collages on index cards. I want to do more of these to get more comfotable with composition.
I bought a scanner last week (hence the change from photos of cards to scans of cards above). I experimented with scanning some things directly and liked this one:
What should I call this sort of thing? Scanner collage? Scanner composition? I'm not even sure if it's digital art. The finished piece is digital—it doesn't exist any more in the real world, but it's not altered in any way (er... not including size - you can see bigger ones on flickr), so I wouldn't call it a digital collage. No matter, here it is and I like the colour.
I took some photos over the weekend and experimented with gimp. Did some cropping and some retouching - in
this photo I removed bits of objects on the desk that had come into the frame. You can see where if you look, but I think it's probably ok if you don't know it's there. I cropped two photos into shape for the flickr
squared circle group. I took
this one thinking I could use the textures in some sort of digital thingy, but when I saw it on the screen, I decided it was suitable for desktop wallpaper, so now it is. You can get 1024x768
here. I did other experimentation that's not suitable for public consuption and took other photos I haven't scrutinised yet. I filled two compact flash cards with marathon photos, but I imagine most of them are crap. Certainly the weather was. The quick glance I had of them looked pretty grey.
I've also made various icons, which I'll probably gather up later. I've used most of them on various posts and comments already. One of them's on this post.
And two sketches, but they didn't scan. One was of a watercolor painting, very rough, more to get me used to the idea of pencil on paper than anything else. The other was out of my head. Again, not great, but I'm proud of it, because I've never been able to draw out of my head, I've always needed something in front of me.
And I did some thinking about and lettering practise for calligraphy. And bought a hard drive so I have somewhere to put all this stuff.
I'll throw these into this post, even though they weren't art by the inch inspired. While I was off sick I made bookmarks with funky foam and card for some bookcrossing people. Look at the flickr pages for notes on who got them and, in some cases, what they're supposed to be.
creative
