The next Ansel Adams?

Several weeks ago I saw a notice from our library about a kids' photo contest and thought maybe Isaac, age ten, would like to participate.  The theme is "water," and we've been out three times to various places by the river and a pond in the park.  He got to use my Nikon, and I tagged along using my cellphone.

We didn't have particularly good luck with the weather on the days when we did get out, and for one reason or another we weren't able to do as many expeditions as I would have liked, but we hung in there and today went through all the photos and chose the one that he would submit.

I was pleased with what he came up with.  Some of the shots had good composition and had the sun been shining more brightly, would have been spectacular:

Some would have been spectacular if the river hadn't been full of mud, as happens when it's been raining a lot:

Some were quite lovely except there was no water in the frame:

Some were particularly nice because they had people:

Unfortunately the rules of the contest called for submitting just one photo.  I thought it would be much better to choose three, but of course that would take much longer to judge.  Here's my favorite: 

And here's Isaac's:

The contraption shown here involves a big green bucket at the top, which slowly fills with water.  When it gets full, it tips over and dumps the water onto the big turquoise plate, which tips and lets the water slide out in a huge splash.  I tried to take some photos of the same thing, but I think all my shots were a second too early or a second too late.  I was so impressed that Isaac managed to get not one, not two but three money shots.  

Now we have to wait a week and a half to find out if he's a winner.  But I think he already is!

Documenting the process -- part 1, pictures

Last week I wrote about Claire Henderson, who just finished a quilt she started in my workshop at Quilting By The Lake in 2017 and sent me a picture.  I looked back in my files and found some pictures I had taken of her quilt on the design wall, and it was interesting to see how the composition changed during the workshop and then at home.

Vickie left a comment: "I do love seeing the process.  I keep resolving to take and organize photos of my process, and add comments and reflections.  But, then, I think I'm too busy to stop and do that.  I've got to find a designated time for this.  Do you have any suggestions?"

Well, yes, I suggest you figure out a way to do it!  I firmly believe that understanding your own process, both the methods and techniques you use to make art and the way you come up with your ideas, is one of the major skillsets of the serious artist.  Maybe there are artiste savants out there who simply channel the universe into art without thinking about it along the way, but most of the artists I admire and respect don't do it that way.  They are able to articulate and recall what they have done in the past, so it's easier to plan ahead, solve problems and incorporate new ideas into their practice.

Vickie is right that there are two kinds of documentation: photos of the work as it progresses, and comments about how, why and how well you did what you did.  Of the many ways you can accomplish this, there's just one thing that absolutely has to be done RIGHT NOW as you work, and that's to take pictures.  So my first suggestion is to get into the habit of taking a lot of photos of what's happening on the design wall.

Making new habits is most effective one step at a time, and step one is really easy -- keep a camera at hand as you work.  Fortunately many people are already in the habit of carrying a phone on their person even when moving around their own house; if you aren't, then make a point of taking the phone or camera with you into the studio.  At the very least, take a picture of your design wall as you leave for the day.  And if you're working on anything complicated, take more -- you can't anticipate when your composition might fall prey to a gust of wind, a helpful toddler or playful cat, or when you lose your place between the design wall and the sewing machine.

(In the age of digital photos, there's no such thing as taking too many pictures.  When I snap the design wall as I close up for the night, I take two or three shots.  Why skimp?  You can always cull out the duplicates, or the ones out of focus or too dark.)

You can't go back and take a picture of what you had on the design wall last week, but you can always organize the photos later.  I was embarrassed, when Claire emailed me last week, to find that I had no folder for the QBL workshop.  So I went back and searched through everything I had taken in July 2017, pulled out the ones from the workshop and filed them where they should have been all along.  Two and a half years late, but now all is in order.  You should aim for a higher standard; maybe once a month?  once a year???

Tomorrow I'll talk about the second part of the process, keeping track of your thoughts.  Too bad there's no way to just shoot photos of what's going on in your head, and organize them later!

Art from the ruins

My art pal Keith Auerbach, a photographer, had a disaster fifteen years ago when a tornado took the roof off his studio and trashed it.  Rain and terrible heat accompanied the storm.  By the time Keith dealt with the more immediate crisis and got to the studio, he found all his negatives soaked, cooked and pasted together in a goo of melted emulsions.  He peeled some of them apart and let them dry, pitched the rest.  He was not happy.  Time passed.

A year or so ago he unpacked the negatives he had saved and scanned them into digital files.  When he opened them in photoshop, they were surprisingly mysterious and beautiful.  Sometimes, where two negatives had fused together, two different images appeared in the scan.  Sometimes the pigments oozed together into abstraction, with no hint of what had been in the original picture.

Keith is a photoshop wizard, so he couldn't leave well enough alone.  For some of the images he played with the color; others looked great straight from the scanner.  The  film came out as negatives; the slides read as positives.

He showed some of these images to our art book club months ago and we encouraged him to keep at it.  And last week, he unveiled dozens of them in a solo show at PYRO Gallery.

These photos are wonderful!  If you're anywhere within driving distance of Louisville, drop in and see Keith's show, through October 19.  We're at 1006 E. Washington Street; check our website for the opening hours.

Last week on Art With a Needle

A bunch of interesting ideas for my "home" piece in the comments this week.  One suggestion:  "Print on fabric and add oomph with thread?"

Many years ago I tried printing on fabric with the aid of Bubble Jet Set, but always felt the colors were washed-out or otherwise strange.  For one quilt I printed out old black and white family photos without any setting solution, did thread line work on top, then put them through the washing machine.  A lot of the pigment washed away, giving a nice faded look to the photos.

One of the photos from that project came out more purple than black, so I made the best of it. 

Purple Myrtle

But since then I have avoided printing onto fabric.  I know that technology has improved and the colors turn out much more vivid, but I don't see this approach as part of my art practice any more. 

Then again, maybe I will try it some day and see whether my opinion has changed.

Another reader, after I revealed what I finally came up with for the "home"show, commented, "Sometimes the simple solutions give us the clearest picture of what we are trying to convey.  This looks like it does the job."

I'm not sure this was a simple solution -- it sure took a lot of work and worry to get there -- but I hope you're right that it does the job.  Thanks to all of you for taking such an interest in my trials, and for all your encouraging comments.

My favorite miniature of the week started with a tiny piece of driftwood that I found while scavenging with my son at the river after a lot of high water:

I find home, finally

The consensus of my art pals was that they liked the photos, but they also liked the home songs.  So, too exhausted to keep fighting, I decided to combine the two and make an accordion book.  Printed out the photos quite small at the top of the page, then calligraphed songs at the bottom.  Put the book together with washi tape.

After all these months of angst and indecision, the execution was surprisingly effortless, except for the two pages that got inkblots on them and had to be redone.  And the two pages that got printed out before I noticed that the color cartridge was out of magenta.

Now I just hope that the pages -- printed onto card stock -- will be stiff enough to stand up on a pedestal for five weeks.  If not, I'll have to build remedial scaffolding behind it, but that might sort of fit the "home" theme too.

The show opens March 28 and will have work by all the PYRO member artists, plus a guest artist invited by each of us.  Drop by if you're in the vicinity of Louisville!

Still trying to find home

I wrote last week about my attempts to make "home" art with machine stitching, and how I abandoned them.  But meanwhile another train of thought was chugging along.

Previously a fellow artist in my gallery had suggested that I go through my 80,000 photos and find some having to do with homes.  I found a bunch that featured people's front steps, and I made 4x6 prints to show to my art pals.

They liked the photos a lot but thought it would not be sufficient to just hang the small prints, as I had done with a lot of photos in my solo show last fall.  Either I would have to print them up really big, or print them onto aluminum, or something else to give some oomph to the presentation.

I was not wild about these ideas, because I have never done any of those things with my photos and I don't have enough time to experiment.

What else could I do to get extra oomph?  Stay tuned.

World-class artist photography

How many times have you heard impassioned and stern warnings about the quality of your photography being so important in getting into juried shows, and for the artist's life in general -- you'll never get anywhere if you have any visible background or tree limbs or clotheslines or god forbid grasping fingers in the photo.

So I got a laugh when the New York Times design section, that arbiter of all things stylish, ran this photo last week:

Jonas Wood, Los Angeles artist, with "Yellow and Orange Orchid Clipping" rug
















Nifty rug, don't you think?  It's hand-knotted in Nepal of wool and silk.  A silk rug nine to ten feet long by this artist sells for about $30,000; this one looks a bit smaller, so certainly affordable for your front hall.  Read the story here, about how artist rugs are seen as art, not rugs.  Very heartening!

Fun with publishing

Longtime readers of my blog may recall that I have been dabbling in self-publishing for a few years now, making little books, magazines, business cards and calendars through the Blurb and Snapfish platforms.  Since getting emails last week about a big end-of-month special deal, I've been chained to the computer making a new book and business cards.  A while ago I wrote a bunch of helpful hints about self-publishing in general.

But today I want to talk specifically about calendars.

I now make calendars in two sizes: wall and desk.  Choosing a theme and revisiting old photos is always a great way to spend a day, and the publishing software makes it easy.

I bring up this subject not only because it's how I have been keeping busy, but because you might like to contemplate making a calendar yourself, and it's better to start thinking about such a project now than on December 27 (although I have made a calendar that way too).

If you want to make a calendar, here are some hints:

Find a theme:  As with commercial calendars, it's good to have all your photos relate to one another.  I've used food, ships, reflections, a vacation for past calendars, and the one I sent off yesterday features pictures of "found art" -- abstract compositions usually photographed from the sides of dumpsters.  The vendors seem to think that everybody will use family pictures, but your quilts would also look great on a calendar.

January on my new calendar

Find a picture:  Of course life will be simpler if all your ships or reflections or found art or whatever are somehow identified on your computer so you don't have to look through 80,000 images to find the ones you want.  I organize my photos by putting them into folders by theme, but I admit that I spend extra time browsing around in other folders just to make sure I haven't missed anything.  Many artists swear by the organizer function in Photoshop Elements, and I highly recommend the Pixeladies online classes for this and other aspects of Photoshop.  Unfortunately we've just missed their current class in Organizer, but I suspect they'll be giving another soon.

all my flag photos, in my computer directory

Use the simplest option:  When you get to the publishing platform and call up "calendars" they'll give you dozens of design options, most of them depressing.  They'll suggest that you place your family photo on a busy background or in cheesy frames with cheesy slogans around the edges or with watercolory flowers strewn around the background.  Pass those by.  Find the option called "simple" or "design your own" or "upload your own;" you may have to click around a bit to get one without a lot of pre-programmed frou-frou.  You want this calendar to showcase your photos, not a commercial artist's idea of "what's hot."  I like to choose a fullpage photo, and perhaps add a line of text to say where the picture was taken.

I don't recommend this design.

Watch the pricing:  The special offers you read about in promotional emails have lots of footnotes and caveats, and you almost always end up with a much more expensive project than you thought you were embarking upon.  But keep clicking, and you may find ways to improve the bottom line.

This weekend, for instance, I was putting in an order for 20 little books.  With the "free shipping" promo code the price was $423, but with the "55% off" code instead, it dropped to $282.

When placing my calendar order, I noticed the option to pick up at my local Walmart or Walgreen's instead of shipping.  Hmmm, maybe that would be a way to avoid the $63 shipping fee -- but after I priced it that way, I realized that I would indeed save the shipping but would lose the 65% off offer that sent me to the platform in the first place, and it would have cost almost $200 more.

Learn on the job:  Go to one of these sites and play around.  See how hard it is to use the software; experiment with how to include text and how to fine-tune the photo presentation.  For instance, I learned only by accident that after you load a photo into one of the "photo here" frames, you can click on the image and find an "edit" screen that allows you to rotate and resize, as well as adjust brightness and color.  When you're done, hit "save" -- and the project will be there months later if and when you decide to actually place the order.  There will probably be several special offers on calendars as it gets closer to the end of the year, but you may be busy the week before Christmas -- better to have a calendar in the can, ready to hit the print button when you see the big sale.

Or if you're in the mood today, Snapfish still has the 65% off deal through midnight July 31.  Good luck, and have fun!

Disappointment in the museum

We drove over to Evansville IN on Saturday night to attend the opening of the 45th Mid-States Craft Exhibit, a venerable juried show that the Evansville Museum has sponsored for many years.  This show appears every other year, alternating with the Mid-States Art Exhibit (which doesn't accept textiles).

I was pleased to have one of my big flag quilts accepted for this show, and was looking forward to the visit.  Six years ago this week I was planning to attend the opening of the same show, and even receive an award, but found myself in the hospital instead for sudden surgery.  So this was a chance to remove a jinx.

As we walked through the museum, we passed signs:

But when we got to the Mid-States room, and I took out my camera, the guard leaped on it.  No photos.

But this is my piece!

Sorry, no photos.

An onlooker summoned the museum director, who said of course it would be fine for me to take a picture of my own quilt.  She explained that they banned photography because the museum doesn't own any of this work and they didn't know whether it would be OK with the artists to have their work photographed.

This explanation was more mystifying than reassuring.

First off, why do artists enter juried shows?  Presumably because they want their work to be seen, by as many people as possible.  (At least that's why I enter.)  And in this day of social media, having your work posted online has the potential of reaching far more people than just those who come to the museum.  Which is presumably the reason why the museum posts those "Snap it share it" signs.  So presumably artists would be happy to have their work photographed, and with any luck, distributed online.

Second, I don't believe I have ever entered a show where I didn't expect my work to be on display for public consumption (including photos).  Yes, some shows are picky and ban photos, but I've always thought this was (a) wrong-headed and (b) because they want to sell catalogs.  For shows that don't have catalogs, like the Mid-States, I am especially interested, as an artist, in having the show documented as widely as possible.  I know my work is going to be displayed in public, and I expect -- even hope -- that people may want to take photos.

Finally, if in fact there are artists who might have reasons to want their work NOT photographed -- which I have a hard time imagining -- show sponsors can take care of that in an instant by putting a line on the bottom of the entry form.  "I understand by entering this show I give permission for my work to be available for photography by the public."  Many shows have similar disclaimers on entry forms for allowing images to be used for public relations, so why not require that we allow use by public photography?  What's the difference?

Please don't protect me from the public!!!  If I want my work not to be photographed, I can easily deal with that by not entering the show.

I am sorry that I can't give you a review of the show, as I customarily do when I get to visit shows and museums that many of my readers can't.  There were interesting pieces on display in the Mid-States, and I would have liked to share my responses with you. 

Pixels and show entries

I had a back-and-forth the other day with somebody who was trying to get images onto a website, trying to clear up some confusion about how high the resolution needed to be.  After that question was settled, she wrote me back and talked about her frustration with trying to enter a juried show through CaFE.

"CaFE requires a pretty small file to be uploaded.  I don't remember the exact size, but I know that I was disappointed with how the photo looked when I tried to zoom in.  Of course, they also allow a detail shot.  Is this how things normally work when entering photos of artwork to be judged?  Why can't I send my 2 to 4 MB awesome photo for clarity and detail at the thread level?  Could you answer this or write a blog?"

OK, I'll take a shot!  The disclaimer: I'm not a computer geek, so those who are may correct me on the details.  But I know I'm right on the overall concept.

First off, some definitions.  Resolution is a technical term that way predates the invention of digital images; it stems from the printing industry, where photographs were translated into tiny dots of ink instead of the continuous tone of the original photo paper.  Much like pixels in a computer.  The more dots or pixels, the crisper and clearer the image.

If you have a certain number of dot/pixels in your image, it may or may not be enough to give you good resolution -- that is, a nice crisp, clear image.  Here's a photo of adorable baby Vivian, sized to a relatively stingy 100 pixels across.  If we display/print it as a tiny thumbnail, it looks OK.

100 pixels wide

But if we stretch it out to huge, we lose the definition.

100 pixels wide

Printers would deal with this issue by talking about dots per inch.  Tiny Vivian's 100 pixels are spread over a bit more than an inch, yielding 80 dpi, while large Vivian's pixels have to go farther, only 17 per inch.

So dpi is not an absolute term; it's totally relative to the size at which you display or print the image.

Why then do a lot of show sponsors specify that an image needs to be so many dpi?  Because they don't really know what they're talking about. Point 1 about misunderstanding: don't think about dpi when you're preparing your images for submission or posting.  Think about pixels.

OK -- how many pixels are we talking about?  Your point-and-shoot digital camera probably produces images 3000 to 4000 pixels wide.  A cellphone camera might give you 4600 pixels.

So why don't we just submit those big, data-rich images to the show and let the jurors zoom in for close views as they wish?  Two reasons: one technical, one human.

First, because too much data takes longer to transmit (from you to the site, or from the site to the jurors) and bogs down the server. And if you're looking at an image on a computer screen, you probably can't tell the difference between a 4000-pixel photo and an 800-pixel photo, so why even collect all that extra data?  (Maybe your computer will let you zoom your view of the two photos below and see how big you have to go before the lower one gets a whole lot nicer than the upper one; I had to go to 250% before the 800-pixel image started to break apart.)

800 pixels wide

3024 pixels wide

Second, because jurors don't want to take the time to zoom in here and there and everywhere searching for something or other, and because they don't want the responsibility of choosing which part to zoom in on -- they want the artist to choose the detail that is most telling.

Side note:  as a longtime juror, I can testify that your choice of detail shot is extremely important in making your submission attractive.  We can talk more about that in another post if anybody is interested.

Sometimes show rules will specify two or three different measurements.  There's almost always a pixel rule:  the image must be 1800 pixels on its longest side, or it must be at least 1200 pixels, or it can be no more than 1800 pixels.   That's the rule I look at, and the rule by which I resize my photos.  I always submit the most pixels I can, on general principles, just in case the image is going to be projected on a big screen for jurors to look at.

Sometimes there will be an additional rule about the image size in MB.  But here's point 2 about misunderstanding: the size of your photo in MB has nothing to do with the resolution.  It is simply a measure of how much data is stuffed into the package.  For instance, if you have futzed with an image in Photoshop, perhaps to remove a stray thread in your detail shot or lose a distracting bit of the background wall, it may end up with more data than it started out with.  The only reason show sponsors would need to specify a maximum size in MB has to do with their system: too much data takes up too much space and time.  But my suspicion is that it's much like the dpi rule, sponsors who don't know what they're talking about, and specifying the size in pixels would accomplish almost exactly the same thing.

But if you see a MB rule, check the size of your image.  If it's too big, you can either resize the image to include fewer pixels, or if your photo editing program allows it, you can choose a lower degree of resolution.  Photoshop Elements, for instance, allows you to save a 3024 x 4032 image at 100 quality (4 MB) or at 75 quality (2.36 MB) or at 60 quality (1.82 MB), or any other number you type in.  Again, if I have to lose bytes, I'll work downward, trying different settings, until I'm just barely below the rule.

And finally, sometimes there will be an additional rule about the image size in dpi.  If they have already specified a pixel rule, just ignore anything they have to say about dpi.  Remember, pixels are absolute; dpi is totally dependent on the use to which the image is put.  People who ask for both don't know what they're talking about.  At best, such a rule is redundant; at worst it's confusing and contradictory.

I hope this explanation helps.  Ask more questions if you want and I'll do my best to answer them!

Out and about!!

On Monday I went for a long walk with some friends, one of whom had a GPS device that said we'd gone 2.8 miles.

Why is this the subject for a blog post?  Because it's the longest I've walked in more than a year and a half -- and I did it without pain, either during the walk or afterward.  For somebody who has always loved long walks, this has been a very long time, during which I worried whether I would ever regain my ability to wander around all day.  It also affected my photography-related art practice, since you can't take interesting pictures if you don't go anywhere.

I bring this up in the blog because coincidentally, yesterday I read about a new study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that says if you have back pain, medical treatment may not be helpful at all.  Don't bother with an MRI, don't take heavy duty painkillers, for heaven's sake don't do surgery, just wait it out, with a bit of exercise if you can, and see what happens.  And I want to testify that they're right, at least for me.

This has been the second time in the last 15 years that I have gone through long bouts of back pain.  The first time I dutifully went to the doctor, got an MRI, learned that some of my discs and vertebrae were rough around the edges, and was sent to physical therapy.  I did three sessions, during which at least half the time was spent discussing when to schedule my next visit around the requirements of insurance reimbursement (no, not to make it cheaper for me, but to make it more lucrative for the clinic).  I quit PT and lounged around for months, walking when I could, until things got better.

Years passed.  The back pain returned. When I visited the doctor for another reason, I told her that I was having trouble walking; she said swim or do water aerobics instead.  I did that all winter.  Still had trouble walking and lounged around for a year, walking when I could.  I kept a diary of how long I walked and the different varieties of pain, trying to figure out what brought it on, whether it was good to walk or good to stop.  Never could figure out a strategy.  But around Thanksgiving it seemed that I could walk farther without pain.  I felt great.

Then I took a bad fall and broke a bone in my toe.  Six weeks of orthopedic shoe and very little walking.  Then, back in real shoes, I could do a mile, then a mile and a quarter.  And Monday, 2.8 miles!

Everybody has various mantras for life, and one of my favorites has always been "outlive the bastards".  This makes twice I've outlived the pain and emerged on the other side.  I know some day this approach is going to fail, but right now, I'm celebrating.

Christmas present to myself

If you've ever used one of the self-publishing sites to make your own calendar, cards or photo book, you may have noticed how excited these folks get around the holidays.  I started getting almost daily emails from both Blurb and Snapfish in mid-November, with new special offers in every message. I love making my own books, and after much trial and error have pretty much figured out how the software works, but I always have sticker shock at the pricing and am always on the alert for special offers.

So on the morning of Christmas Eve, I was drawn by Snapfish's offer of 70% off on all photo books.  I took a vacation with my siblings in New Mexico last month and had thought about making photo books as mementos, had even started to go through my pictures and choose the best ones, but it took 70% off to make me actually do it.

And since I was blissfully without social obligations for the whole day, I spent a couple of very pleasant hours revisiting my trip and coming up with a little book.

If you've never made a photo book with one of the online services, or if you have been frustrated with your attempts, maybe these helpful hints will make you more likely to try again.

*  Learn on their dime.  You can start a project that you don't even plan to print, just to play and figure out how the site works.  I have also had good luck with Blurb's help desk, sending emails when I couldn't figure out how something worked and receiving fast, helpful responses.

*  Photo sites have long memories. Feel free to start a project, upload photos, even get the whole book finished, and then walk away.  Sometime in the future they will offer you 70% off, and you can go back and hit the "print" button.  But review your work first; I often find that my second look at a project reveals things I'd like to change or improve.

*  Upload more photos to the site than you think you'll need.  It's easier to upload one big batch and omit some of them than to be interrupting yourself to upload more, one at a time.

*  Make your own cheat sheet of the photos you have uploaded.  The book sites arrange your pictures in teeny weeny little thumbnails in a long column that often extends off the page.  To find what you're looking for you have to scroll, squint and try to remember what you have already used.

When I get all my photos on the upload page, I take a screen shot and paste it into my Paint program, and keep this window open alongside the photo site.  Then as I use each photo in the book, I cross it out with the pencil tool.  For a more complicated project, I would label them with the page as well as cross them out.  It's way less frustrating to navigate around your own familiar desktop programs and zoom in if you have to than to keep track of things in the photo site program.

* Remember that photo sites are aimed at the dumbest, least creative people in the universe.  They are designed to help dolts make photo books that don't look awful, without having to put any thought into it.  But you're not like that, are you?

You should forgo the themed books, the ones with pre-decorated pages, the ones with fancy curlicues around the photos.  Look for the "simple" option, the one where you design your own book.

When they show you a blank page, check out the tab called "layouts."  For my latest book I wanted one photo per page.  I chose two options from the layout menu: one with a landscape photo, one with a portrait photo, and for each page, used the appropriate layout depending on my photo.  Those were the only two layouts used in the entire book, so it had a consistent look.

You should especially forgo the option to have the site automatically flow your photos into the layout.  You know which pictures are best, which should come first, which two should go together on a spread.  This is the joy and creativity of making your own little book: designing and arranging the pictures and text for the effect you want, not a haphazard collection assembled by an algorithm.

*  If you want text on your pages, you don't have to choose one of their text layouts, which generally place centered type smack in the center of your page.  Instead, call up a text box and choose your own font, color and point size, then move the text box to exactly where you want it.  With a full-page photo, I look for a place in the picture with an uninterrupted area of solid or almost-solid color, and choose either white or black type to show up against this solid area.

* Photo sites don't have to be just for your vacation or grandchildren pictures.  Make a book of your quilts, your collages, your sketchbook, your Photoshop experiments.

*  Write down what you learn!  Every time I use one of these programs I discover something new about how the platform works -- often I learn how to do something that had me cursing and throwing things the last time.  I have a Word document called Blurb and one called Snapfish where I document my projects -- my personal user manual.

* Have fun!  I love making little books -- so far I've done two personal ones (this one for my siblings, and one for my husband) and four "general readership" ones that I sell or give away.  Last month I also learned to make calendars.  If you like taking pictures and think some of them are worth saving, I encourage you to try one of these sites and see if you like the process and the product.  Let me know what you think.

Book publishing for fun and frustration

How to kill two days and not even notice the time going by -- publish two books!

I did a Blurb book several months ago and have been on their mailing list for a lot longer than that.  But then they sent me a 50% off message and I thought it might be time to do a new book.  I had actually started uploading photos a while back, but stopped when I got sticker shock from the first Blurb project.  Monday night, with the 50% off offer running out, I decided it would be fun to have some books to dole out at Christmas.

I have to tell you that I don't much like Blurb.  Their interface is clunky, one of those "we know what you want to do" computer programs that to a certain degree allows you to bypass their "we know what you want to do" layouts, but only if you sweat blood while doing so.  Yes, you can put something other than the copyright notice on page 3, but only if you pay them extra.  Yes, you can put text or a photo on page 20 of your book, but only if you pay them extra; otherwise the final spread of your book looks like this.  (That's the Blurb logo occupying the real estate.)

Don't know about you, but when I'm paying a buck a page, give or take, I hate to have two pages taken away from me as commercials for the producer.

And I don't believe I've ever worked with a program that has no UNDO button!  If you do something wrong, or even worse, if you just do something that the program gets pissy about, you have to painfully reconstruct what you had before -- if you remember it right.

After a couple of hours of wasted time I figured out how to specify my own layouts instead of using the (inadequate) ones on their standard list.  But it still chops me that the instant I click on one of my custom layouts, the menu instantly reverts to the standard list, so it takes me three clicks instead of one to specify the next page.  And I still haven't figured out if there's a way to specify my favorite typeface for the entire book, rather than scrolling through a list of 200 faces to find mine at least once per page.  (If I loved Arial I wouldn't be so bitchy, since it would be at the top of the list, but I love Palatino....)

Blurb's default face for body type seems to be Georgia, which isn't a bad face at all (it's just that I love Palatino).  So why does it default to Trebuchet on the title page?  How many people who don't know typography from tomography end up with books that inexplicably come with a non-matching title page?  How many of them even recognize it?

When I finished up the book yesterday morning and hit the "send" button I was struck with one of those irrational thoughts, along the lines of "that bottle of wine was fabulous, why don't we order another?"  And sure enough, I spent the rest of the day on another one.

Book #1 is a series of photos of a door and a bench.  I've been struck with the poetic and existential implications of this combination for several years, and have gone out of my way to photograph them wherever I go.  Book #2 is a greatest-hits compilation of my favorites from the "Sign of the Week" feature on this blog.

I even set up a mechanism to sell the books, in case anybody is moved to want one.  But thanks to the clunkiness of the Blurb site, I am so far unable to figure out how anybody might access the page to buy one.  If I ever find out I'll let you know.

Well, enough crabbiness for one day.  I had a lot of fun making the books, even if not so much navigating the system to make them happen.  If Blurb sends me another coupon I might even do another one.  Meanwhile, if you know of a self-publishing site that's cheaper and less frustrating, let me in on the secret!

Entry woes

You might think that after somebody has entered 100 shows or so, it wouldn't be such a big deal.  But yet again, it's entry time and I'm struggling.

This time it's for Fiberart International, a very prestigious show that comes around every three years and attracts artists from all over the world.  I was fortunate to be juried into the show once before, in 2010.  The next one, in 2013, unfortunately had the same entry deadline, give or take a week or two, as Quilt National, and the three quilts I had so tediously finished for QN constituted my entire artistic output for the year.  So I had nothing to enter in Fiberart International that year.

So this time I was determined to have an entry, and it is centered around the knots I've been tying for several months.  The entry deadline is midnight tonight. I finished the last piece on Friday and this weekend did the photography -- that shouldn't be too hard when the art is only a few inches tall, should it?  No struggling with big design walls or wrestling huge quilts into position.

But too small can be just as challenging as too large!  My point-and-shoot camera, usually utterly reliable for extreme closeups, refused to focus itself on the knots for detail shots.  Here's what my beautiful sculptures were looking like in the photos: a blur.

Fortunately I have a good friend who saved my life by using his much nicer camera to shoot gorgeous photos this afternoon.

Now the last hurdle: what to call these pieces.  The first ones that I made were called "Specimen", a name I liked because it was indeterminate as to the nature of the things depicted.  Are they animal, vegetable or mineral?  I'm not sure, and the name left it ambiguous.

So the obvious name for the series I'm entering in Fiberart International, in which the knotted bodies are emanating from old wooden spools, would be "Spool Specimens."  Oops.  Too close to disastrous connotations.

I still have several hours to come up with a good name.  I'm thinking, I'm thinking....

FNF 3 -- award of excellence

The second award of excellence at Form, Not Function went to Sara Drower of Wilmette IL for a tiny piece (maybe 12 inches wide) based on phototransfer.

Sara Drower, Quilted Construction #2 (detail below)

I apologize for the bad photo; the piece was framed under glass, which made it difficult to see the beautiful details, and even more difficult to take a photo.  Had I bought this piece (I didn't -- somebody beat me to it on opening might) I would have immediately taken the glass out of the frame.

It's a photo of a construction site, strewn with miscellaneous debris, which is rendered on the quilt with tiny beads and metal springs; the machine quilting enhances the grid format of the new construction and the city in the background.

I was delighted to see a small piece win a major award.  Although I personally love to work huge, and believe that size adds to impact, I think too often small pieces are overshadowed by big ones and overlooked by viewers and judges.

And this piece is exquisite.  Except for the glass.

Learning Photoshop -- final exam for course 1

My online class in Photoshop Essentials is over and our final exam was to do at least five different things to an image.  I don't think I'm necessarily an overachiever, but I do have a hard time stopping when I'm having fun.

I have been having difficulty in choosing images to work with in this class.  Why is it that in real life many photos are drab and lifeless, but when you want to find one for homework you can't?  I have played with several photos and couldn't improve them very much, probably because I have a pretty decent camera that knows how to point-and-shoot.

So I decided to use the scan of one of my daily collages from last year.  Because the photos were cut mostly from the newspaper, which uses mediocre paper and relatively low printing quality, they started out drab and lifeless, and maybe the scanning process squeezed a bit more life out of them.  Doesn't this image cry out for improvement?

So I put the image into gray scale, improved its distribution of dark and light, posterized it, added color to the bread, straightened the fortune cookie fortune, and put lines around the thought box and the ballplayers.

All of which took a lot longer to do than to read about, thanks to a lot of trial and error.  I'm still a learner, forever finding myself on the wrong layer and/or using the wrong tool.

But in a week, class 2 begins and I will no doubt learn way more things to do.  I can hardly wait!

A year of found art

You know I'm a devotee of regular art -- projects in which you commit to making something every day, week or month according to the rules set at the outset.  I've been doing daily art every year since 2003, which you can check out at my other blog.  These projects have been my personal activities, but for some time I've also had the pleasure of doing regular art with a partner, Uta Lenk, my quilting pal in Germany.

We started out in 2010 and 2011 by exchanging emails every day, each with at least one photo.  Then in 2013 we did thirteen posts, each consisting of thirteen images of thirteen objects.

Last year we changed the rules and exchanged photos of "found art" --  accidental patterns and compositions created by man or nature and discovered by camera-carrying observers.  We had both enjoyed taking this kind of picture in the past, so we didn't have to search very hard to come up with our weekly contributions.

One of my favorite places to find found art is on the sides of dumpsters.  They get scratched up by rough handling, then they rust in the scratches, they attract graffiti, and occasionally they get painted over, yielding surfaces that remind me of Pollock or Rothko.

One of Uta's favorite subjects is reflections, and she's much better than I am at finding them.

I'm posting our found art to the blog we started in 2013, Dreizehn Thirteens, in case you want to see what we have been up to on both these projects.

And yes, we're doing a joint project this year too, but for now it's just between the two of us.  We'll fill you in later.