Painting Technique

My two year old grandson loves to paint, and this video by his Mom amazed me when I first saw it. Why do so many students lose the creative joy they possess as youngsters?

Another Composite

This one came from my grandson Jackson's interest in playing "Plants vs. Zombies". He seems to have outgrown it a bit at the age of five, but showing a background of the playing field on his portrait seems like a good expression and creates a busy, colorful and interesting image. I also left him out somewhat in my last post, so... only to be fair!

New App Addiction

So I just purchased a new app that I have found fascinating as I get into it more and more. It's called "Enlight" and it really has me thinking about imagery beyond the immediate, which I have worked on for years with students in my New Media classes. The tools toward conceptualization are familiar, although more "filter" based, so with a bit less control than with a full blown editor such as Photoshop or Acorn.


I have just started to realize the ways I can use this, so I have a few examples to post here. The first, a self portrait was done with an overlay of a rose image, and then filtered with a flowery background. I find the mood reflects feelings I had the other night when I got a text from my wife that she wasn't feeling well, so I brought her home a salad (food is always good for the soul), a small bag of her favorite candy, and a single yellow rose (a mutual symbol of our caring for one another for the past 45 years). The shapes of the rose petals highlighted create a soft surrounding of my face and the dominant transparent green is a calming influence to the brighter and higher contrast reds and oranges of the small flower shapes in the background.

 The image of my grandson on the right is overlaid on a shot of orange slices laying on a light table (the background patterns). He always enjoys eating, and while he was playing "peek-a-boo" with me and his fork last weekend I took this image of him. The bright colors in this symbolize to me his innate joy and the patterns in the background create an order and regularity that is important for a young child's sense of security and confidence. His left eye is a dominating center of interest that has a great tension with the fork and balances the less busy lower left side of the image.

Pockets of Light

I actually worked on this in December, but am just getting around to doing a post from it. It seems funny how the web sometimes misleads you, but that was the case with this piece. I saw a "pinhole" photography article on the web where "this guy" (name withheld) divided up a pinhole box camera with compartments and placed a lens on each compartment to shoot the photo. What he didn't say until the bottom of the article in fine print was that to make the picture look "right" you had to spend quite a bit of time on Photoshop to adjust and move around all the image sections.

I had to get a little creative with how I organized these, so I "framed" them all and adjusted exposures, to make them noticeable as individual frames.

Reflection Underware

Just before Christmas I sent this image to "Hunny Bunny", asking her if she would be interested in something like this for the holiday giving season, but I was quickly rebuked in a return text message.

This from a display window at Haymarket Square in Boston, and I think the way the reflection set up on the mannikin's torso and the sort of double illusion of what appears to be a human (no navel though) body along with the detail of the shoppers through the windows, make this an image worth taking a second look.

People are inherently interesting, and the depth of this photograph once you start peering into the reflected space adds a bit of discomfiture in the act of gazing into a "human" frame.

Multiple Me's

Playing with mirrors at the request of Joshua, one of my Digital Photo students, and we found a number of interesting "set-ups" with the four mirrors we were using. I ended up taking this with my phone, but you can usually see the phone in the image, which I am not too fond of, but in this case it was somewhat disguised by all the geometry in the image.

Prince Edward Island Crab

I had a drawing from our trip to P.E.I. last summer, and it needed "finishing", so I got our my pencils and went to work on it. I obviously had a particular idea in mind as I created the image, but when I take out ink to detail and pencils to color, the work often transposes in some sort of way. In this case, I found a figure and embellished it, kept the palette limited with some highlights, and attempted to give a sense of movement to the "crab".

"Red" Auerbach

This portrait of a sculpture of a well-known Celtics coach was taken in Boston at Haymarket Square and I felt that some of the same problems with shooting portraits existed with this image. I did go into the background of this shot with Acorn and blur it considerably so as to divert attention from background.

Rearranging the Manger

It was sort of funny that when the kids got to the house for Christmas vacation, that Jackson went to the manger scene that we always put up in the house for the holidays and changed all the characters around. He was sort of funny about putting the animals around the baby Jesus to protect him and having the people stepped back a bit. I guess he just didn't trust the "Wise Men" completely.

Emma on The Train

We had a wonderful last two days on our Art/Music Boston trip, and the students were amazing. Giving them the opportunity to make choices, plan ahead, and develop their own solutions to various dynamics and logistics allowed them to step up and accomplish things while enjoying themselves.

This is a shot of one of the students on the AmTrax ride down to Boston!