Now that winter is here, move those wooden skewers from your grilling area to your art gadget bag. In the last few weeks, I have found these indispensable in painting leaves and poinsettias. Lay in a colored wash and then use the skewer's sharp point to indent, not tear, the paper. The pigment sinks into the indentation, creating a believable leaf vein. I used to use orange sticks, but a few weeks ago the only ones I could find in all of Bloomington were BIG orange sticks and the points just weren't small enough for the leaves I was painting.
No. 2: Photo editing "on the cheap"
Really cheap -- as in FREE. If you don't have Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or good photo editing software from your camera, this may be just what you're looking for. Go to www.irfanview.com, click on "download," and follow the instructions. Although it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the big name products, it does provide the necessities such as crop, rotate, resize/resample, special effects plus more. When I started the blog in September, I discovered I needed better photo editing on my laptop so I downloaded Irfanview. It has worked wonderfully.
No. 3: Watercolors on the Square
Check out the watercolors at Gallery North and By Hand Gallery, both on the Bloomington Square. The Bloomington Watercolor Society has several members exhibiting their work on Gallery North's "Gold Wall": Vi Working, Kathy Karnes, Kriste Lindberg, Tina Allgood, Tricia Wente, Jacki Frey, Jeanne Dutton, and Nancy Metz. In addition, several of Gallery North's members (Jeanne Iler, Cathy Korinek, Linda Meyer-Wright, Carolyn Rogers Richard and Gillian Harris) are showing their watercolor works. On the south side of the Square, visit By Hand Gallery and look at works by Tricia Wente, Sara Steffey McQueen and Bonnie Gordon-Lucas. By Hand still has a couple of floral paintings by Alice San Pietro, whom I admired greatly.
2 comments:
Hey, Just thought I'd pass along some other free photoediting options. Although I do 85-90% of my editing with the Canon software that came with my DSLR, I find the following "freebies" useful at times: GIMP (similar in capabilities to irfan); Adobe Photoshop Express (amazed its still free with its capabilities and up to 2 gigabytes storage); and Picasa (simpler than others with fewer option but I've done some amazing things with it).
Also glad to hear Alice's paintings mentioned. We still treasure the ones we have on our walls. She and Tony were such a part of our lives, it's still hard to believe they are both gone. We miss them every time we come back to Bloomington.
Dan
Just looked at the barn paintings based on my photo. They all did a really nice job and should be proud of what they have accomplished. They obviously have some talent as well as a very good teacher!
Dan
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