Mixed Media Artist

Most photo-editing probably has a desaturate button, or maybe even a grayscale mode. These remove the color and also the life from a photo. Photoshop had a wonderful conversion method in the Channel Mixer: you’d add an adjustment layer, tick the monochrome box, and slide your green and blue sliders up to total about 100. Red would stay down around 0 so that you wouldn’t be adding unwanted noise to your print. Here’s what you’d get: would become… Not too bad, but still kind of dull. The new Black and White dialog box is used in an adjustment layer. Here’s how it works: 1. Open your image and duplicate it. 2. Click the Adjustment Layer icon and select Black & White. Click on the auto settings. It’s already better than what I did using the Channel Mixer!! But it can be tweaked quite a bit more. 3. You can play with the sliders by color if you want, but here’s the really fun part: click and hold right on the image itself in any area you want to adjust and you’ll get a scrubby slider. ...

1. This time use a sheet of foil for your background! Wrinkle it and spread it back out without pressing out the wrinkles. 2. Use Golden’s GAC 100 as the acrylic medium that you mix with your paints. Do not use any water! This will eventually cause the paint to peel away from the foil. Use only heavy-bodied tube acrylics, mixed with the GAC 100. 3. Paint with Quinacridone Gold and Lumiere’s Bright Gold. 1. The piece on the left uses a strip of watercolor paper and two smaller strips of corrugated paper. Use polymer medium to attach the corrugated pieces. 2. Brush more polymer medium over top. Sponge with Quinacridone Crimson and Quinacridone Violet. Use stencils or stamps with Dioxazine Purple. 3. Apply Metallic Bronze with a small dry brush. 4. For the piece on the right, apply strips of masking tape unevenly to the surface of a piece of watercolor paper. 5. Paint with Dioxazine Purple and Permanent Violet Dark. Dry thoroughly. 6. Stamp Quinacridone Red dots through scrim, or apply do...

Here are three background paper techniques for you to try out next time you've got an hour or so free. You’ll notice that I was using and reusing the same colors over and over, and sticking largely within the same color family. The reason for this is that I wanted to have a slew of papers that would all work together for some upcoming projects I have planned. 1. Use a sheet of 140 lb watercolor paper. Apply extra heavy gel medium unevenly with your hands. 2. Stamp in texture with a large stamp and let dry (or use a heat gun). 3. Give it a light glaze of Quinacridone Gold acrylic. 4. Sponge lightly with Permanent Violet Dark, Quinacridone Violet, and Citrine. Repeat with colors as many times as desired. 1. Use a sheet of canvas paper and cover it unevenly with cheesecloth. 2. Press polymer medium through the cheesecloth to adhere it to the canvas. Dry thoroughly. 3. Paint it with Quinacridone Red and Metallic Bronze. 4. Sponge with Quinacridone Violet, very dilue Dioxazine Purple, ...

One of the nice things about this technique is that you don’t have to have a really high-resolution image to start with. Since most of the detail is purposely lost, you can start with something less than ideal for a print. You can play around with color too: although Nate’s eyes look blue in the original photo, they are really turquoise green-blue, so I picked a closer color match and changed his shirt to play up that color. 1. Duplicate the image, desaturate, and duplicate again. 2. Invert the duplicated black and white image, and apply the Color Dodge blending mode. 3. Add a small Gaussian blur, and touch up the background or any other part of the image that needs it. 4. Add a new layer for each new color and use the Multiply blending mode. 5. Select the face in the first color layer to add red. As you progress through the next steps, do not lose this selection in the history path! 6. Choose red as your foreground and white as the background, and paint the face selection. 7. Adjust t...

Links to all of my top recommendations on the following topics can be found at the Why Not Art bookstore . Collage and Assemblage Altered Books and Artist Journals Handmade Books Fabric & Beads Photoshop/Digital Art Creativity Recommended Magazine Subscriptions Technorati Tags: mixed media , collage , assemblage , digital art , photography , altered books , art journals

Dani, a few months ago, working on her Phoenix in the open air portion of the wood carving studio…with her new favorite tool :-) Copyright 2007 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

OK, here’s the verdict: it’s difficult to come up with a convincing digital version of a Polaroid image transfer, and it takes a LONG time to do it. It is a lot easier to do these physically with the DayLab machine. But I am so addicted to my Photoshop, I just have to try to see everything that it can do. Compare these two shots: The frame on the second one still needs a lot more work. It is way too solid and dark. The upper one is better, but probably still needs a few ink smears along the edges to make it really good. Anyway, here’s what you’ve gotta do, and you can decide for yourself if it’s worth going to all this effort: 1. Scan a piece of watercolor paper or canvas to use as the base. You could also just create this in Photoshop using the texturizer. Save this as an 8 x 10 image. 2. In a separate file, create a border for the image transfer. I adapted the directions for creating a "grunge" border found here at Kirupa.com You’ve got to size your border to either 3 x ...

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to try out an image transfer machine by DayLab . It is extremely cool! You insert a slide, expose a piece of Polaroid film, let it develop partway, and transfer the negative to a piece of watercolor paper or fabric! Very very cool. This is the (mostly) developed picture… …and this is the transfer from the negative. If you do black and white shots, or shots with subtle hues, you can go in and color them afterwards too. Here’s a gallery of images on the DayLab site. If you decide that you want to play with this type of transfer, first you need to know that the machine isn’t cheap! You might really want to think about taking a class if you can find one to make sure that you really enjoy the process. But here’s the rest of what you need to know: DayLab has workshop teachers (note 2012 - sorry, link no longer works, but you can still contact DayLab through their site)  listed on their site and some simple instructions to get you goin...

Over at WetCanvas , we did some simple paper casting as an October mixed media forum challenge. The results were really fun! It’s so easy to do, as our friend Sue explained to us. Most of us used one of two simple methods: * wet some toilet paper with liquid starch and press it into a mold, or * wet a piece of watercolor paper and mold around the object with your fingers Obviously there are a lot more sophisticated ways to do paper casting, but we found that these two methods were very versatile, and allowed us to experiment using stuff we already had around the house! Sue graciously listed many other links, which you can find over at the WC thread . Copyright 2007 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

This little quilt, September Morning , is very similar to one I did awhile back called My Heart . The techniques are identical, except that I didn’t dye any of the fabrics other than the organza and the lace. Fortunately for me, I had some stained materials left over from the last quilt, so I just used those. The directions can be found here: Making a monchromatic art quilt . Even though this quilt is much more colorful than the last, it still gives the effect of being monochromatic, with the addition of the neutral creams. The leaves were cut from a lucky fabric find from about 12 years ago. No, we don’t throw stuff out in my business :-) Staining fabrics in coffee Copyright 2007 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 journ...

Here is an experiment that I did with the new Match Color function in Photoshop CS3 . The basic technique is really easy, deceptively easy…the real work begins after the buttons are pushed, and I’m still tweaking my pictures! 1. Open the image that you want to work on and an image that you’ll use as a color source in Photoshop. Make sure that the image you’re going to doctor up is on top and selected. 2. Click on Image –> Adjustments –> Match Color. Chose the second picture as your source (the drop down box is near the bottom). You’ll be able to see immediately how the palette selection will alter your working image. 3. Play with the luminance, color intensity, and fade sliders until you are satisfied. 4. Now the real work begins! If you really want your image to resemble the artist whose source material you’ve chosen, it’s now time to start working on the style. I began with using the Paint Daubs filter. These pieces aren’t anywhere near finished since they were just for practi...

Below is a little (10 x 8 inch) art quilt that I made from various fabric and paper scraps. I started with all off-white fabrics, and before I started “piecing”, if you can even call it that, I stained them all with tea to even up the tones more than they already were! Working with a monochromatic color scheme forces you to explore other ways of bringing contrast to a piece besides color. I also used some of my favorite things on the quilt - an image transfer, beads, and antique buttons. My Heart Materials & Tools: cutting mat rotary cutter scissors pins fabric glue needles fabrics and papers buttons beads gold thread transfered images (if desired) 1. Instructions for making an image transfer onto fabric can be found in this post: Image Transfers on Fabric . 2. Stain or dye your fabrics in a strong tea solution. 3. Cut a piece of batting to approximately 9 x 7 inches. Lay a piece of tea-stained muslin, slightly larger and with frayed edges, over top of the batting. 4. Begin to ...

Materials and Tools: images scissors packing tape or contact paper water canvas foam brushes acrylics matte medium liquid or self-leveling medium (optional) cardstock 1. Paint a small canvas with the acrylic color of your choice. Cut or tear out pictures from a glossy magazine or catalog. Apply packing tape and burnish well. (more details on making packing tape transfers can be found at this tutorial. 2. Cut the transfers to the sizes you need and arrange them on your canvas. Soak in water and remove the paper backing. 3. Moisten the canvas with a thin layer of matte medium and apply the transfers. Top them with another thin layer of matte medium to cut the shine. The shine you see in this photo is from my flash…the surface has a satin look, not glossy. 4. Without waiting for the top layer of medium to dry, paint around and in between your images to soften the lines. Add any colors that you want. 5. Make a tape transfer of a phrase that you want to add to your collage. The nice thing a...

This is one of the most simple collages that I’ve done in a long time. The biggest departure for me was to mirror image what I might normally do: most often I would have the bird on the left side, looking towards the writing on the right. I am still not sure if I like the final results here, but it was an interesting exercise to flip things around. And I didn’t even sew anything onto the collage!! Shock! It is so hard for me to keep it this pared down. Anyway, here’s how I made it: 1. Print out an image that you wish to transfer onto an inkjet transparency. The instructions for doing one of these transfers are in this image transfer post . Transfer the picture to smooth colored cardstock instead of fabric. Cut it out and top it with gloss medium. 2. Take two similarly sized squares of patterned or colored cardstock. Keep the background square whole, and rip a strip out of the other. Cut a piece of dark cardstock (I used black) slightly bigger than the patterned square. 3. Adhere the st...

While I can’t tell you the exact settings that you will need to use to alter your photo into a slightly blurred "fuzzy memory", I’ll take you through the steps that I used on Joshua’s portrait. It’s a bit hard to tell online, but Joshua’s features are in focus while the rest of the image is softly blurred. And the color has obviously been changed. So, grab an image that evokes sleepytime or daydreaming for you, and let’s go! 1. Open your file in Photoshop, duplicate the image, crop and size it. 2. Add a curves adjustment layer. Lower the contrast, dim the highlights, and dull the whites. 3. Add a hue/saturation adjustment layer. Tick off colorize, and add sepia tones (hue approximately 38, saturation approximately 25). Shift the lightness slider left until satisfied. Adjust opacity. 4. Merge all layers onto a new layer. 5. Add as much gaussian blur as you like and adjust opacity. 6. Apply a layer mask, and bring the child’s features back with a large soft brush. Copyright 200...

Photoshop "stamps" are really easy to make. You’re actually using the Brush Tool, but instead of dragging it to paint with, you merely click it in place and your image is stamped onto the background. You can change the color of “ink” that you use, fool around with the opacity and blending mode, anything that you’d normally do in Photoshop . After I cut out my expanded square with an exacto knife, I mounted all the pieces onto white cardstock. Then I scanned it. So here’s how you can turn your scan into a Photoshop brush in 3 easy steps: 1. In the layers palette, double click on the background layer and rename it to layer 0. 2. Use the Magic Wand Tool to select the white background and delete it. Don’t forget about any white parts that are inside the square. 3. Go to Edit —> Define brush That’s it! Give it a name and start playing with it. Try painting with it too…you never know. I suggest saving your file in a folder outside of Photoshop as well. When you ...

Not every landscape photo is well-suited to the tranquil feel of this one. I look for strong lines, not too much detail, and water! As usual, when it comes to manipulations done in Photoshop , I can’t really give you exact settings for filters and colors. Each photo is different, and you’ll have to do some experimenting with your own. Still, here’s basically what I did: 1. Open your image file and duplicate it. 2. Apply the smart blur filter to the entire shot. I used a fairly high radius and threshold on this one because I wanted the water and sky very blurred. 3. Apply a layer mask, and fill with a black to white gradient, bringing back the sharper edges of the land and dock. 4. Add a channel mixer adjustment layer. Check off monochrome, and adjust the sliders to give you a good looking black and white shot. I usually keep red very low or even on zero, and make blue and red add up to around 100. 5. Add a curves adjustment layer. Lower the highlights so that there are no harsh whites....

Like all altered book projects, there are really no rules that must be followed. However, there are a few things that will make your life easier if you want to make one of these! The first tip is to use a box cutter to make the holes for your image or images. Make sure you’ve got a sharp new blade - book covers take some work to get through, and you’re much more likely to have skipping (and cuts!) if your blade is dull. I used clear silicone caulk and Elmer’s carpenter’s glue to create a “frame” around the cut out. When they are thoroughly dry, they both accept acrylic paint quite well. I also used the carpenter’s glue to attach the fabric to the one cover. I used acrylic paints on both covers, and added some texturizing media to the Homer cover before painting. I checked in with my favorite folks at the Altered Books yahoo group to gain the benefit of their collective wisdom. Here’s what I’ve been told: If the cover is shiny, prime, sand, or gesso it. Otherwise, not really necessary....