Look at What I Can Do!

I was cleaning up my various email inboxes and came across some Photoshop tutorials that I'd signed up to receive, and of course never looked at because I have no time (sarcasm) to learn anything new. One caught my eye, about being able to use text to reveal an image. I clicked on it, fully expecting jargon I would not understand about functions of Photoshop that don't exist on my ancient version of the program, Photoshop 7. (I have a couple books on how to use Photoshop 7 and can't seem to get through a single chapter without becoming annoyingly confused.)

"HAH!" is what I said when I pressed Ctrl + Alt + G -- and the image you see appeared, with the text revealing the image. I felt like I had just reached into my top hat pulled out a rabbit smoking a cigar. And it was so easy. I made a new file image and filled it with black, put text on a new layer, made another new layer, and pasted the image on it. Then the Ctrl + Alt + G thing ... presto!

The image revealed by the text is of the tomatoes sitting on the counter waiting for someone to eat them. We've had sliced tomatoes, tomato and cucumber sandwiches, salsa, tomato-onion-garlic-basil on pasta, salads with tomato, and we love them all. In fact, I'm going to go pick some more tomatoes right now. Day before yesterday, the total was 21 pounds 5 ounces.

I love tomato season.

Update: After picking the tomatoes, the season harvest so far weighs in at 29 pounds 4 ounces.

Labor Day Effort

For quite a few years, the Filthy Pikers have toyed with the idea of "10K for Labor Day" -- that is, writing 10,000 words over the four day Labor Day weekend. I've never managed to achieve that, but this year, I thought I'd give it another try.

In my voyage of creative discovery, I realized anew this past weekend just how much I hate deadlines and quotas. I could not find a single drop of desire to write, even though I have two interesting stories started.

However, I followed my sudden rabid urge to create. I needed to make an image to go with Charles Cicirella's poem "Modern Day Job" in the Piker Press, so I tackled a work of pastels. No, I wasn't thinking of the Hulk when I made green the focal point of the picture. (In fact, when I was done I wished I hadn't used green.) It was a lot of fun having ALL my pastels spread out on the side of my work desk, so much so that I'm going to do that again today.

Then it was time to move on. My Sony camera has more features to it than I was ever able to use (DSC-H400), but with the creative urge on, I perched on the back patio in the morning light and just played with the thing. Photo after photo, setting after setting -- it was glorious!

This is the breadfruit plant that thrives in the southeast corner of the yard, under a canopy of fern pine and hopseed. I loved the way the light was shining through this newly-unfurled leaf.

My neighbor's queen palm was blooming, and I had a good view of the fascinating golden cascade. Using the fence as a tripod, I was able to get a nice zoom-in of the blossoms.

Back to the shade and morning light! Bernie has a coleus on the shady bank, the variety is called "Camp Fire." The stems are dark red, nearly black, and the leaves catch the light beautifully. Sadly, the camera didn't want to catch the light except as a glare.

All that warm, pinky lit-from-within color was lost. How can a camera see things so much differently than my eyes? Exploring a light-blocking setting on the camera (for the first time ever) gave a somewhat better result:

From the darkness of the shadows, I moved to full sun on my potted corn plants. After giving me a few delicious ears this summer (it has been a lousy corn year everywhere in the Central Valley because of the high heat), the corn has dried. Beautiful when it's green, beautiful dried, too. When it turns white, I think of it as "ghost corn."

Back to the studio, and Photoshop. I needed a cover image to accompany Ken Dubuque's humorous essay, "Armed and Dangerous." Using some public domain clip-arty images, I was able to cut and paste together a contraption that put me in mind of the mommies who barrel along the sidewalks, shoving huge buggies before them, all the while staring at their smart phones:

The stripes were simply for graphic effect visually, but what was stupendous to me was that in fiddling with settings and tools in Photoshop, I was able to get onto the screen just what I could see in my head.

Between Photoshop and my camera, I was able to capture this antique-colored portrait of Bernie's zinnias. I've always loved how zinnias hold their shape even while their summer color begins to fade.

And finally, since our cell phone joined the ranks of Electronics That Refuse To Do What They Were Meant To Do, Bernie got me a Motorola g6 that has a pretty spiffy camera feature of its own. This is the first photo I took with it, on Monday evening:

My glass of wine! What better subject could there be, at the end of the holiday weekend? And with that tenth picture, if a picture is worth a thousand words, I did achieve 10K for Labor Day. Cheers!

Artsy Fartsy

I wanted to do an illustration for Pete McArdle's funny story, "The Scarsdale Doctors Diet" in the Piker Press. I took a bunch of pics of the full moon on Sunday night, and got one that wasn't horrible.

But I could even do that in Photoshop without the photo! It wasn't dramatic enough as a moon shot, and I spent a pointless twenty minutes looking for a tree silhouette in public domain stuff on line ... then realized I have lots of tree silhouettes in my own photos.

In my Flickr account, I found one that seemed to fit the bill: a nice silhouette, a sky that was not too busy, colors that were simple.

Then I bled the black out of the moon shot, (trying to get a blue background instead of a black one) and turned to the other photo. I inverted the colors on the tree shot to make the branches come out white, selected the blue color from the bottom of the inverted pic -- a nicer blue than I came up with on the moon pic -- and spread it upward on the sky of the tree image. Back to the other pic again.  I selected the sky on the moon shot with the "Magic Wand" tool, inverted the selection so that I got only the moon, and pasted it on the tree shot. Yeah.

I did some tinkering with the blue colors and the "Paintbrush" tool (making it about 50% opacity and a fuzzy edge) and scrubbed at the sky a little -- I didn't want it perfectly homogenous, but didn't want a lot of variation, either.

By this point, I'd spent about 40 minutes from inception to a reasonable product. Four years ago, it would have taken me all day and a case of the hives to boot. Practice, practice, practice. Do, do, do. Dang, it pisses me off when good advice really does pan out if you take it. Could not my artistic ability have sprung forth fully-formed from the brow of Zeus and saved me all the sweat and nerves and twitches?

With the final image on the screen, I reduced the size, and got one of the best Photoshop images I ever thought I'd get.

My, that sure feels fine.

More Art Bits

One of the stories in the Piker Press the other week was "Me" by Michael Price.

The story is about a very self-absorbed young man, and I remembered I had a pic of a narcissus stowed away in my Flickr account.

But while a narcissus may symbolize self-absorption, garage siding, the front bumper of a Vibe, and the neighbor's tree do not.

In Photoshop, I copied the leaves on the bottom left, and pasted them on other parts of the photo. Then I 'selected' only the narcissus flower itself and put it on top. A 'paint daubs' filter gave me the texture I was looking for, and thus I ended up with an illustration that pleased me greatly.

 
I do believe I also used Edit-->Transform-->Scale before I did the 'paint daubs' treatment.

And added a border by pasting the color pic onto a new field of black, merging the layers, and cropping off all but a medium frame of black.

This goes to show that we should take pics of everything in case you ever need a pic of anything.

Maybe someday I'll even have a use for my photo series "Things on the Back of Trucks."

Heh!

 Today's cover story for the Piker Press was an anxiety-producing short story called "For Sale."

No you won't see the pic there until next week -- it only appears on the cover until October 8th, then I'll move it to accompany the story in the archives. Hey, I didn't set up the system, I just try to work with it.

Anyway, I took this photo of a for-sale sign, and then brought it home to play with Photoshop.

I changed the colors a tad, adding yellows and dimming agents to the whites, darkening the overall picture a little.

And then I really began to have fun with it -- I erased the logo and real lettering and made up my own stuff to put on the sign.

For several weeks in a row now, I've known in advance what I wanted to do with a cover image, and was able to carry out my plan adequately. That's some progress for me. Having a plan that works shaves some five hours of work off each effort.

I'm feeling a renewed interest in art work -- could it be that the weather is more conducive to hours in the studio? So much more interest is percolating that I wanted to find a carpet for my cement garage studio floor. (Standing on cement kind of gets painful on the old feet.) Today Bernie took me to a flooring liquidation store, and we came home with an inexpensive carpet piece that will be easy to clean and has a carpet pad for added cushioning. I can hardly wait to install it, and see how it changes the look of the studio.

Cheers!