Sunday, May 17, 2009

Make It Mondays - Vintage Photos

2009_365_130 Queen Of The May
I'd fallen off the MIM bandwagon this last month or so, but this past week's Make It Mondays theme is Vintage Photos! Hmmm.... wonder where I'll find some of those.... So here are two digital ATCs that I've been working on since I took the "Intro to Photoshop for Non-Professionals" class at Mount Mary College. This month's theme for the Milwaukee ATC group's live trade is "May Day! May Day!" so the Queen of the May above started out as a vintage lady from the Ten Two Studios Tinted Twenties Cuties image CD. She quickly became smothered in flowers from a Dover "Old-time Floral Vignettes" clip art CD and then run through some of the Photoshop standardized filters just to see what happens. Poor girl doesn't know what hit her (hence the dazed smile)!

And I say "quickly," but actually the process took me hours of cussing and redoing and so forth as I learned my way around the commands. I'm planning to do a limited edition series of prints of these, but even then one print will probably represent an hour of grumbling - I mean "work" :D

Below is "The Merry Month of May," which uses a scanned black & white image from my personal vintage photo collection.
Playing with "Merry Month of May"
The right edge of this one is cut off by my blog format, but you can click on the image to see the full version on Flickr. The original photo is tiny, only about 1.5" x 2.25," but scanning on a higher resolution picked up more detail of a group of women outside taking photos of each other in artsy poses. I thought it looked a little like they were doing a May dance. This scan below shows the original at actual size (or close enough depending on your computer!)

4 comments:

Terri Kahrs said...

Lucky lady was "hit" with your magic Photoshop wand (I mean mouse!)! Both of these pieces are awesome, Carolyn. What a departure! Having tried to learn Photoshop, I understand your frustration and pain. But look at what you've created! You GO, Girl!

BTW, thanks for the blog visit. I always enjoy your visits and your encouragement. Hugs, Terri xoxo

Carolyn B said...

Thanks, Terri - yes, Photoshop has been a bit frustrating probably because I've been using Micrografx Picture Publisher(company now defunct) so I know in theory what I want to do, but it's like learning a foreign language!

I did try to use my husband's Bamboo Fun Wacom tablet, which has a pen-shaped mouse, but still getting the hang of that because if you so much as shift your weight in your chair, the line suddenly squiggles across the screen!

Cathy Spivey Mendola said...

I just love the ATC and the other piece. I am so jealous of your photoshop abilities. Every time I think I'm going to devote a whole day to playing around with photoshop and all the tutorials I've downloaded, I get sidetracked reading and gawking over everyone else's blog and looking at flickr. One of these days I'm going to figure it out!
They're both beautiful and I LOVE your recycled denim apron. Very clever.
have a great week!
cathy

Carolyn B said...

Thanks, Cathy - I had the same intentions of teaching myself Photoshop - even checked books out of the library but never got around to reading them before they were due back. But some folks from the Mount Mary book arts group decided to sign up for the class, so I did too, and it definitely helped to have a live teacher who could answer my questions when I got stuck!

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