Non-Self-Portrait Artsy-Fartsy Tuesday Blatherings

How's THAT for a subject line? HA! Thanks for all the blogiversary wishes yesterday! I'm glad you're all stopping by and I especially enjoy it when you take a minute to say "hey". Deb asked, "where is that beautiful photo from. is that natural or have you fiddled with it." The photo is of a stream on our property, but yes, it's "fiddled". I wanted it to have a dreamlike, almost surreal quality, so I used a soft-focus filter, and I messed with both the contrast and the color saturation to make it just a bit over-saturated and then a bit over-exposed. The original photo (which is actually a bit under-exposed in the foreground because of the backlighting you can see in the treeline) without any changes other than resizing it for the web looks like this: Unaltered stream photo I would mess with the light and color a little if I were going to print it with a "real" look, but not much - not nearly as much I did for yesterday's post. And for today's Daily Art Thingy I did some sketching. I'm not quite sure where I was going with this sketch except that I couldn't really think what to draw, so I held the sketchpad in my left hand and used my right hand to draw my left hand holding the sketchpad. With me so far? Then on the sketchpad I drew onto the real sketchpad, I drew a contour drawing of my left hand. Then on the far right you can just barely see a drawing of the tip of my pen and right hand drawing the contour drawing on the...uh...wait a minute. I've totally lost my train of thought. Screw it. Here's the sketch: "Hands"