Birthdays

I have actually been doing a little art, here and there (a little more this week, but we'll get to that in another post); I've just not had a lot of enthusiasm about posting. I spend most of my day on a computer for work, and I have two weekly posts over at Printsy, so by the time my "spare" computer time rolls around, generally I would rather play with GIMP, or catch up with the Reader (yeah, I know, I've not posted anything about that, either, but there have been some good ones, so hopefully I'll be able to pull together something for you on that next week). So, this blog suffers. Bad, Amie, bad.

Well, I had three birthdays (two within days of each other in April, one at the beginning of May) to come up with cards for; fortunately, two of the recipients aren't fussy and were happy with the same card. I took two of the images that I'd played with in GIMP, and turned one

Goofy Murri - digital drawing
© Amie Roman

into a very "quick & dirty" relief print:

Goofy - MDF block print, Dremel carved
Daniel Smith water soluble inks on card stock
© Amie Roman

and the other:

Sitting - digital drawing
© Amie Roman

into a watercolour:

Sun Spot - watercolour
© Amie Roman

All cards were enthusiastically received, and I'm safe for another year (oh, well, until Christmas...)

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!)

More Sketching

I'm working on actual paid work this week, so not much brain space or enthusiasm for figuring out a new print project. So I've been taking some time in the evenings to do a little sketching, instead. Murri is a great subject, and a lot easier when he's napping; unfortunately, he wasn't napping much, and a bit squirmy, which of course makes sketching more of a challenge. These sketches were from the last couple of evenings.

This afternoon, I was waiting for supper to come to a boil, and thought "what the heck!", so this is the result:

Sketching

There are so many incredible, inspiring artists who produce work every day. Not me. I'm generally lazy and uninspiring. But I thought I'd share the few sketches I did today of my captive subject matter by the fireplace.





After his long, tiring session as model, Murri curled up in his blanket nest on the couch to recouperate.