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Victorias home is beautiful– stylish, comfortable, homey, filled with air and light and the details, all carefully placed, revealing the truth of a good life thriving.  In her bedroom was this small and lovely painting an artist had painted of Victoria when she was just a child.  A lovely expressive memory of her life that is now framed on the wall and cherished.  I instinctively photographed it.  I think I knew in that moment I’d be making an art piece later, and so I did.  It’s one of my personal favorites.  Perhaps the directness of her gaze, the textures and strokes, the overlapping of youth and maturity all coming together.  A picture captures what we look like.  It’s perfect.  Ahhhh,  but the textures.  Interpretation is the invisible thing a painting can reveal in it’s thoughtful imperfection.

Demi Lovato is a fabulously talented young performer and when I saw her backstage at the Endfest last year here in Sacramento I saw her as a living piece of art too.  Her hair was absolutely gorgeous with a mermaid quality both in color and length.  It had been dyed in gradations of blue, green to yellow.  Really incredible.  We were at the meet and greet prior to the show and in walks this sweet looking girl– Demi Lovato— with the incredible hair and as the headliner you can imagine the buzz around her.  She was very sweetly shy about the whole thing too and so gracious.  It was lovely to meet her, this sweet girl, in a swirl of chaos.  But wowie kazowie when she took the stage that night it was an entirely different woman who traversed the stage with star power and ownership.  And later, when I saw this performing photo in the ones I’d shot that night I was reminded of the iconic image of Raquel Welch in One Million BC— in the way she was standing and the powerful attitude.

Art is my job.  Wait, Art is my hobby, no my job, no, my hobby… Woah there… it’s both!  When I’m not shooting pictures and doing design or retouching or teaching workshops I’m making art.  And lately I am ALL ABOUT THE APPS!  So many awesome things to play with on my iPhone and my iPad it’s making me crazy happy.  I take a picture, I play with it in an app, then open it in another app, then I may even open it up in Adobe Photoshop on my computer and tweak it just a bit more.  Woo hooooooo baby.  App Attack!  Here’s one from a iPhone photo I shot of the Tower Theatre in Roseville California last weekend.  I adore neon, who doesn’t.  And I’ve run the picture through two apps and Photoshop and then added a piece I cut from a drawing I did in a third app to create the border.

(Image above is the original drawing, see bottom of post for the version discussed in this post)

Apps! I have so many of them they take up most of the space on my iPhone and iPad. But I LOVE them! There are incredible things out there for the creatively insatiable like we are. And even though the results of the art we create on the mobile devices may not be magazine quality/dpi it doesn’t mean we can’t use them to make art or to embellish our art. App-depending you can still get a decent quality out of most them I have found. And if not I’ve found I can tweak later and make it work.

I’m a digital artist… duuuuh. But I have found a couple of apps that I think are brilliant and monster kudos to their creators who took their time and brilliant genius to get them into the app store at .99 a pop so I can do and create things beyond my scope of abilities in Adobe Photoshop.

This particular image is a hybrid of one brilliant App and a pretty amazing website I was turned onto.

The website is http://www.mrdoob.com. The site has been around for years and has some amazing things on it but the one I enjoy when in a doodling mood is Harmony. I have no idea what the creator did, how it works, only that it does brilliant craziness and I love the results. I simply make a drawing, do a screen grab, open up the drawing in Adobe Photoshop and away I go– adding color, altering lines, drawing in faces and more line.

This image was originally drawn on http://www.mrdoob.com, then saved to my photo stream. The additional wave of fun is due to a hippie dippie App that makes me insanely happy called Phototropedelic. Psychedelic and fabulous if you ask me. Do a little button and numbers selection dance in there and bingo bongo, next stop Photoshop where I dialed in some color and a few more minor adjustments. Ta daaaaa!

I like to create for the sake of creating, don’t you? It’s how I learn. Trying things out, seeing what it will do. WHAT IF… That’s the game. If you haven’t yet why not play it with me? I’d love to see what you’re up to, please share and I just may post it! xxxooo

This just makes me laugh!

I’m always on my computer in my archives searching for something and often come across fun or unexpected file photos.  This one of Owl City is from End Fest last year. I was one of the photographers shooting the meet and greet and just before the crowd began to line up I had an opportunity to meet Owl City.  I asked them to jump, who knows why!  Only this one member said yes and I shot two consecutive frames then animated it.

When it comes to working with your subjects and something pops into your head It never hurts to ask them to do it because you never ever know what will happen next and what kind of fun it might lead to.  This just makes me laugh. 🙂