Chicken Warhol?

During the school walk-out today, I was a nerd and stayed in class... and learned how to do this!

Ready to travel!

Inspired by some browsing on Etsy, I decided to make a passport cover.  My first passport is currently on its way to me in the mail, ready for some summer travel.  I'm pretty excited.  Here's my little creation for it... it's pretty basic but will get the job done.

Just goofing off

So here are some other photos that happened along the way with my homework...

This is my boyfriend's evil kitty... don't let her pretty looks fool you!  She refused to be in a good spot for the photo... her body was half in full sun and half in some fairly dark shade.  Good thing some photoshop work could fix that and even out those bright areas and dark areas.

A pelican hanging out on top of a restaurant near the beach... he knows where the food is.

I had no idea if my camera was really catching this bee in action... success!

And last night I discovered the joy of screwing around with black and white settings and blending modes to create what looks to me like something out of scary movie advertising.

Painting

Digital painting class is pretty cool.  We are using Corel Painter 11.  I get to bring my Bamboo Fun tablet in to school to use and practice with.

The other day we learned charcoal and pastels.

Here is my charcoal sphere:  Used different sized charcoals and the smudge blender.

Second the pastel work:  This was created following an exercise from our book.  Started off with a tan colored paper surface instead of white.  Used a large square pastel to roughly block in colors, then smudge blend and rough blend.  To finish the details, a smaller pastel brush size was used.

been a while...

So it's been a while since my last post... Ok almost a month!  I got lazy.  I'll post a few things to show some new work!

I'll do a few separate posts to keep this organized.

For digital photography class, I got out and about for some landscape shooting.  The "winning" photographs from my 3 shoots for the landscape assignment are as follows:

At the beach:  I actually photoshopped 5 people out of this photo.  The beach was just too busy to get a shot without people in it!  I think it turned out well.

This is a really cool park in a local neighborhood.  They have some of the history from the area preserved there.  I like how it looks like it is in the middle of a farm... just left of frame are houses and a busy street!  Also got some photos of some chickens from there - hoping to use a chicken in my Andy Warhol composition later on.

This is part of a fun local hike...  I was hoping to somewhat frame the composition with the foreground branch.  I love this time of year when the hills are green from the rains.

I'm really excited I can get shots like these with my little point-and-shoot.  Most people in my class have really nice DLSR's... I'll have to save up for one of those eventually.  <3

First few weeks of school

So, I'm a few weeks into school now and I feel like I've learned a lot of helpful things already.

Photoshop:  I've started using Adobe Bridge for viewing and launching into Photoshop.  The Bridge is a great preview tool.  Also learned how to compile pictures into a pdf.  I've gotten a lot of helpful keyboard shortcuts and miscellaneous tricks that made me go "OHHH I wish I knew that when I was trying to do ____"!  Overall I'm getting used to the layout and expanded functionality since before I only had Photoshop's Elements version.  Our first big project is to get some digital photos and prepare them to look nice in a calendar.  I've chosen my 12 photos so I'm ready to go!

Intro to Graphic Arts: We just scratched the surface with Illustrator, which I had never used before.  I'm REALLY excited to learn more and play around with vectors.  We learned how to do a trace on an image to vectorize it.  Pretty fun.

Digital Painting: I'm playing around with my graphics tablet more.  So far we are just sketching and getting the feel for using the tablets.  Corel Painter has so many brushes and tools it's a little overwhelming.  I'll have to get the hang of it to learn which are my favorites and how to navigate the software quicker to get what I need out of it.

As far as Digital Photography class, I've learned a LOT but am quite disappointed that a lot of the things the teacher has been talking about I can not do with my camera.  However, it is really useful to know how everything works and how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO affect each other.  At least now I know what everything in the metadata means and how to interpret that to take a better shot next time.

Here is a fun picture I took this week of one of my dum-dums while playing with camera settings:

This photo is for my photography class, part of our first shooting assignment was to photograph "interesting shadows":

Finally Starting School

Well, after missing the first day of school due to power outages shutting the place down, school has finally started!  I am excited about my classes which can be summed up as follows: Digital Imaging (Photoshop), Intro to Computer Graphics, Digital Painting (Using Corel Painter), Digital Photography, and Motion Graphics.  The projects sound fun and I'm ready to start creating some things!  Good thing I have lots of photos piled up from the last few years of messing around with amateur photography to use for some of my projects.

While I was waiting for school to start, I did some more sewing and made myself a large bag and pencil case (totally non-matching).  Here are some pictures:

Sewing galore

Finally completed a couple of sewing projects I had wanted to get to.  I'll go over a little of my process and thoughts as practice.  I've been sewing since my mom taught me when I was about 10, and try to find time for some fun projects when I can.  Luckily I have a nice "vacation" to get some projects in right now.

First of all, here is my Cockatiel wall-hanging quilt.  It is about 14" x 16".  This was my first-ever attempt at an art quilt.  It was actually a lot of fun!  I felt like a kid again doing somewhat of a color by number project.

I drew the design myself, then figured out where my pieces should be located and where to use what color fabric.  I traced my pieces onto Steam-A-Seam 2 then stuck this to the appropriate fabrics.  The Steam-A-Seam then became the stencil to cut the fabric out.  This was my first experience using Steam-A-Seam and it was amazing because it has a temporary double-stick nature (hence the "2").  This allowed me to move the pieces around during the layout phase to re-align when necessary.  After everything was lined up, all it needed was some quick ironing to fuse everything into place.

I decided to attempt some stitching work to add in detail and nail down the fabric securely.  Unfortunately, my sewing machine is not set up for free-motion so I had to work in mostly straight (or straightish) lines.  Here is a sampling:

I am pretty happy with the way it all turned out considering it was my first project of this kind and would try another if a good idea strikes.



Ok I found this fabric and fell in LOVE.  It is highly adorable and it has birds - what more could I ask for?  I found this free mini-purse pattern called the Buttercup Bag at Made By Rae's Blogger site and thought it was fitting.  Would like to give her props for writing such a cute and very easy-to-follow pattern.

I have a small bag of extra buttons from garments, and found the black button there.  Easy and fun!

I just completed another bag this morning.  This bag is much larger and could probably fit a notebook.  I found this pattern on artsy-crafty babe's blog.  She has a couple free patterns, including the Pleated Tote found in pdf format.  Another wonderfully put together yet easy and quick pattern to make.  I decided to replace the suggested loop closure with a magnetic snap inside.  I'll probably be using this as a shoulder bag and purse for school.

Well I have a few other ideas cooking up.  I will probably make at least one more of the mini-bag with some other cute fabric I have!  Hope you enjoyed the sampling of some sewing things I do.

Photography walk

Thought I'd share a photo from my walk the other day! It was nice weather for a winter day, and since I am unemployed I went for a mini "nature walk" in my neighborhood and snapped some photos. This is my favorite from the outing before I've gotten to photoshopping...

Zazzle Store is up!

Well I created a few things on Zazzle!

Check out my Zazzle store here (theBirdFlew)

My favorite so far are my blog-themed shoes. This shoe designing thing is SO fun.

Birdie Shoes by theBirdFlew
Try out the custom shoe builder online at zazzle