I describe myself as a mixed media artist, which can mean anything really. Elephant dung? Washing lines? Tissue sculpting? Layered lettering? I use pretty much anything that comes to hand, perhaps not elephant dung…
I thought I’d show you how I put this image together. I rarely start with a ‘recipe’, a direct route from a to b with guaranteed results, rather I start with an intention. In this case I wanted to make an image for my upcoming Creative Community topic which is all about altered art.
I began with a close up photo of a detail from a bookshelf I decorated. I liked the glow of the gold leaf, the textures and mysterious shadows. I will often use my own work from my paintings or journals as a background. It’s a great resource and you might get several interesting backgrounds from one image.
I then opened the picture in the app iColorama. I do love this app but it took me ages to learn to navigate it, it is like an arty labyrinth. If you are new to art apps and wary of overwhelm I would suggest Pixlr which is friendly and easy to navigate. If you go to the briefcase on the left and click on double exposure, you can load another picture on top of your original.
This has loads of exciting potential! You can play with the opacity to have your images as bold or as faint ghostly suggestions. In my image I have had a wander through my photo collection (I collect loads! Things that interest me, without any clear intention of what I’ll use it for.) I added a picture of an alchemical tree and a picture of me, twiddled around with various filters etc, until I liked it. A little tip here; as there are so many variations of what you can do it might be bewildering to know which to choose. No worries! You can have them all, save as many as you like. You can always delete them later.
I’ll be talking about more alter-art techniques in the next Creative Community. Join up by 12th June for lots of inspiration.
Happy Arting
Fran 💜
