TtV Photo Traipsing...

Today I went photo traipsing with my friend Amy through the Denver Botanic Gardens.  We were both shooting TtV and explored every nook & cranny of the gardens.

I've been shooting TtV with a Kodak Duaflex II but I've been wanting to shoot with my Argus Seventy-Five for a while now so I finally built a contraption to fit it last night and these photos were all taken with the Argus.  The lenses give softer edges to the photos and I'm generally a lot more pleased with it.  An unexpected bonus was that the contraption for the Argus only took about a 1/10 of the time to build that it took to build one for the Duaflex.

Bye bye Duaflex!  There's a new TtV favorite it town.  I'm heading to Spain later this month and definitely taking the Argus now.

Things are happening!

I'm really excited today because one of my pieces, 'Last Flower Standing', has been featured on someone else's blog for the first time.

http://lovarevolutionary.blogspot.com/2009/04/flickr-picks-lova-revolutionary-blog.html

This piece took me a really long time to make- about 40 hours. It's one of my favorites because of it's brilliant colors. There are more pictures of it in my Etsy shop here: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22068425

*************************************************************************************

Today I've been laying down the sky for the large piece that I've been working on over the last week. This took me about 6 hours today- it is a very painstaking process but I'm happy with how it turned out. The colors are a bit dull in these pictures but once I apply the varnish at the end, they really brighten up and you get the full effect.

Someone asked me why I bother covering the entire canvas with a background, only to cover it. The short answer is that it would feel unfinished to me if I didn't. There IS a sky behind every tree, and grass or other vegetation behind the trunk. And behind the blooms there are branches. I would always feel it was a shoddy half-finished job if I left those things out. So I don't. Which is why it takes so long to put all the different layers together. I did the same thing to a cityscape piece that I made which is about 2/3rds covered up, yet it had to have a full sky. Perhaps it's the nerd in me.

The next step for this new piece is to lay down the trunk and the branches of the tree and then the blooms, which is my favorite part. I started picking out the stamps for the blooms today. This is a small sampling:

I was really hoping to have this piece finished today, but I always underestimate the length of time it will take, usually by many hours. If I can get the trunk and branches laid down tomorrow, then I can finish it on Friday. Stay tuned....

Andrea at Studio6

Putting the pieces together

I'm working on a new piece in anticipation of all the pink spring blooms that have to arrive in the city. I thought I would post some pictures along the way of how it all goes together.

First I decide on background colors. In this case it's greens & blues for grass and sky. The first step is to wrap stamps around the sides of the canvas. Sometime I do all the sides first, especially if it's all going to be one color, but in this case I only wrapped the grass and then worked my way across the front. I try not to have too much overlap of stamps because I hate to lose any of their artistic 'face value', but I find it nearly impossible to lay them out in such a way that there is no overlap. This is the incomplete piece with the grass laid down.

Next I'll lay down the sky. Then the tree trunk and branches and then finally, the fun part, the profusion of pink blooms. I'll post more pics along the way as I go through these steps. I'm hoping to have this piece completed by tomorrow but that might require working most of the night, so we'll see.

Andrea at Studio6