Saturday, July 16, 2011

Process Over Product...

You know, I need to remember to respect the process of creating art as much or more than the product. I need to share my work in progress whenever I'm working on something instead of waiting until Lord knows when it is finally finished, I guess. Which, currently, would be this start on an art journal page in my Little Gluebook of Wisdom.
Four or five days ago I began with a cross-weave stroke watercolor wash, on top of which I couldn't wait to slap the colorful city traffic graphic image I found in one of my magazines. (And looky, I found my Art by Aimeslee Photoshop brush, hehe.) I took a photo, meaning to share. A photo taken in process helps me really look at it fresh, too.

Of course, the photo made me wish I had stamped some border stamps horizontally on the background before glueing on the image, so I did the next-best thing and masked the image off with scrap paper to  stamp.
Stamp by stamp, I created the horizontal lines I wanted. (Also, you will have to imagine more and more stamps, because I neglected to snap photos after every different one.)
This image is almost too colorful (never! hehe). It needed the lines to balance it on the page and in a way help it blend to the background more (if that were possible).
I love this recreation of a busy rainy night in Times Square, NYC. Love the yellows, the black, the touches of red, the dark blues.
Love how all the colors reflect on the street like they are mixing with the motor oils and rain and sludge.
Eventually, I added lines of border stamps across the entire length of the page. The stamp colors really anchor the reds and blues in the image. It's pretty much done, except for the quote, which I've chosen but haven't created in PSE and printed out yet.

That's yet another use for an in-process digital shot. I can size my quote text perfectly as a new layer on top of the above image, laying it out exactly as I want it to look, then print only that top layer. I got to where I was doing this a lot in Paint Shop Pro, but this will be my first time attempting it in PSE. I hope it's intuitive and easy enough for a beginner like me. Or I could go rogue and just add the quote digitally to share now and add a printed one later. I read in Claudine Helmuth's second book about heat tool transfers and I have really wanted to try out my heat tool doing that. If I printed the layer out backwards, I could do it.

Decisions, decisions.

Will share the finished product once I have one, but for now, here's the process.