Website 10,000!

Thanks everyone! I just passed the 10,000 visitor mark this week for my website. Wow. I don't recall when I started keeping track, but I think it was pretty soon after I got the site up & running in its current form, which would have been around April 2007. Just think of how many more hits I'd get if I actually added work to the site regularly!

Not Gone...

...but mostly working. If you want to see what we got up to over Easter, head over to Roman Life. It was a great trip, but we did a lot of driving through the most miserable, snotty weather I've ever driven through (really pounding rain, gale force winds, slamming hail... and a little sun).

Oh yeah, and I've been gardening. Yup, it's that time of year again (which means that later it'll be preserving! Yum, salsa...).

I think that I'm a one-track person. I can either work on the computer. Or I can garden. Or I can do art. I don't seem to be able to switch modes. I admire those who can.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm likely to be doing less art and more other stuff as the weather improves. But I'll keep you posted of any art stuff that happens - there are some shows etc. coming up this summer that I'll be participating in, which is pretty exciting.

Print Day!!

Printmakers, unite! May 2 is international Print Day!! So grab your tools, inks & plates and slap some paper down to make prints.

Check it out at Printeresting.

Happy birthday Mom - we'll be spending it printing :)

Uncover the Cure

For those of you who don't know, I have been participating in the local Vancouver "Uncover the Cure" event for each of the past three years it's been running. This is its fourth year, and I'm walking again for a fourth time!

Participants must raise $300 in order to actually take part. Proceeds from our efforts go towards funding research towards fighting cancers "below the belt" - ovarian, prostate, colon; all those "secret" ones we don't want to talk about, often ones that go unchecked and unattended because we're embarrassed to even discuss it with our physicians.

I feel very strongly about this cause. I have had relatives and friends directly impacted by these type of cancers, one of whom would have had a much better opportunity at survival, or at least longer life, if she'd not been in so much denial and had gone to see her doctor sooner. To be fair, she was of a completely different generation, and it was about 15 years ago, when, even then, these cancers weren't really discussed. I believe these cancers are overlooked and are not as popularly supported as others, yet they are much more widespread and common than we think.

I have had incredibly generous support from friends & family in the past three years; please consider supporting me in my efforts again this year. I have an online donation page here and if you're not so keen on paying on line, then you can download a charitable donation form here.

Katherine Tyrrell - Thanks Again!!

Once again, Katherine Tyrrell featured Burnishings on the April 5,2009 edition of "Who's Made A Mark This Week" on her Making a Mark blog, referring this time to my digital sketch entertainment.

Thanks, Katherine!!

Artist of the Month

Four Oceans Press has selected me to be their Artist of the Month for April, 2009! I'm very honoured, thank you for that! The two works featured are (click on the links on the titles of the works to see their progress & development):


Xocoatl from the Food Alphabet Exchange, summer 2008


Queen of... from the Fruit Alphabet Exchange, winter 2008

Theme & Variation

More graphic tablet entertainment! Here's the black & white version:

And a mosaic of colour versions (if you go to my Flickr account, you can see larger versions of each individual colour version, too. Vote for your favourite!):


Again, black & white:


Mosaic of colour:


Woo-hoo!! So much fun!! Gotta go back to work again tomorrow and have family visiting this week, so probably won't be playing again until later in the week or even next week. But I'm really getting such a charge out of this, and, apparently, am inspiring many of you to dust off your graphic tablets and give 'er a go - good on ya!

Addict

I am having way too much fun with this digital art stuff. Here are some more:



And a little colour:

Murri makes such good subject matter! And these are all from mediocre photos, they're good enough to use as a template for digital sketching, though. These are going to make some great relief prints!

Does anyone have any favourites?

Graphics Tablet Coolness

I splurged and invested in a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet at the beginning of this year. I've been using it to play with GIMP, figuring out some of the bazillion things that can be done in that program. And is it ever fun. Allow me to demonstrate.

(BTW, please do not think that this is in any way, shape or form an exhaustive or excellent demonstration of the resources available with either of these tools, I'm just getting started and I've never used any kind of real image manipulation software before).

Start with this:


And then play a little bit with paths, feathering and gradient fills, add one ferry trip between Duke Point and Tsawassen, and Beginning GIMP, to get this:


While I think photo manipulation is fun, and I'm sure I'll do more at some point, I really wanted to be able to use these tools to draft ideas for printmaking, one way or another. I thought I'd try using a few of the tools I'd used in that exercise with this photo:


drew a path around Murri, copied & pasted into a new layer in another file (which I'd started with a black fill as background), then used the Ink tool to draw elements over top of the cut-out of Murri. I would hide the Murri cut-out layer intermittently to check my inking progress. It's quite a challenging tool, because it acts quite a lot like an old-fashioned cartridge or fountain pen in that if you're not careful, you'll blob ink everywhere! But the gorgeous variation in line thickness and shape, I just can't resist. I added a few gentle details using the regular Pen tool, too.


I went back to the first photo:


and did the same thing:

Then I thought I'd do a reverse of the colour scheme, black on white. So from this:


I got this:
Click on it for a larger view. I think it's my favourite so far.

One more:




Kind of similar to my earlier pen & ink Murri sketches on paper:



but much easier (especially as this photo Murri doesn't move around!)