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Showing posts from February, 2008

Mixed media collages with embroidery

Pesach This collage was made in a very similar fashion to this one I made over a year ago: My Favorite Things I wove the background stips of paper together and adhered the paper cast center before beginning the rest of the embellishments, but otherwise, the two are pretty similar in construction methods. Here’s a link to the tutorial that I wrote on making collages embellished with embroidery . Copyright 2009 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact. Technorati Tags: mixed media , collage , assemblage , digital art , photography , altered books , art journals

Cyanotypes with Photoshop

Old-fashioned cyanotypes vary quite a bit in color from print to print. When you want to create one digitally, a good way to chose the color is to scan a real cyanotype and sample the color from it! If you don’t have a sample of a real cyanotype blue to use, here’s a fairly decent way to find one. You’ll need to play around with the sliders until the color looks good to you…there was quite a bit of variation in the color, so don’t feel that it has to match one you’ve seen exactly. 1. Open your image in Photoshop and duplicate it. 2. Open the channel mixer, tick the Monochrome box, and play with the sliders. I like to have blue up around 80 or 90, red from 10 to 20 to add noise, and green at 0. Lower the contrast too. 3. Open up a curves adjustment layer, clipped to the previous layer. Pull the line up somewhat for blue and down somewhat for red. Mess around with the settings until you like the overall color and contrast. 4. Select an oval around your main subject. Select the inverse an

How to make a scrapbook wrap

Here's an in-process project that I'm working on right now: a fabric wrap to go around my Guatemala trip album. I can’t complete the wrap right now until the photo album itself is finished, since I don’t know how thick it’s going to end up being. So what I did was to cut a piece of base fabric several inches longer than the current width of the entire album when it is opened and laid face down. I want my wrap to…well, to wrap around the album when it’s done. This isn’t meant to be a traditional book cover with nicely mitred corners and all. It’s kind of messy, which is what most Guatemalan fabric lends itself to. First, I cut a piece of lightweight striped cloth that was meant to be a tablecloth. I cut it to wrap the album, with the stripes going up and down. Next, I cut pieces of heavier weight placemats, only as wide as the top of the album, and spread them over the surface, with their stripes going horizontally. I used a large zig-zag stitch and sewed down the face of the wr

How to make a beaded assemblage

One of my other tutorials on the basics of bead embroidery will be very helpful here! When you’re going to embroider a piece of fabric and then glue it onto a structure, use either ultra-suede or buckram as the foundation, depending upon how heavy the beads and bits are going to be. Here’s how I made this little piece: 1. Create a cabochon by pouring resin over an image inside a bottle cap. 2. Trace around a wood disc onto a piece of ultra-suede. 3. When the cabochon is set, glue it to ultra-suede and bead around it until you’ve reached the borderline. Clip the foundation close to the stitching and add an edging row or two. 4. Drill a hole the same size as your dowel into a print block. Make it about 3/4 inch deep. Drill a groove into the back of the disc on the flat side to cradle the dowel. 5. Use wood glue to glue all pieces together. Glue the beadwork onto the front (dome) side of the disc. Copyright 2008 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May b