« Older Archive for July, 2009

Magnets, Set 3

Sunday, July 26th, 2009 by Alyice

Do you remember my second batch of magnets? I really love altering my images and turning them into magnets.

Here’s my third batch of wildlife magnets.

And…

The magnet on the bottom right is actually a floral arrangement. After digitally painting it I realized a part of it looked like a poodle so I cropped it out and wellah—a poodle magnet. Isn’t it darling?!

Keep Creating…

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Thanks For The Writing Gig

Monday, July 20th, 2009 by Alyice

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had a knack for writing. Someone hurt me, I wrote. Someone angered me, I wrote. Someone made me happy, I wrote. I wrote because I was too afraid of confrontation, too afraid of my own feelings, too afraid of being rejected. Writing was, for me, a place of comfort. It released emotions that allowed me the opportunity to move on with my life and it was extremely cathartic.

For the most part, those writings stayed with me then later made their way to the trash, but on rare occasions those letters of anger and disappointment made it into the hands of others and that was not always a good thing. Some people can take brutal honesty, others cannot. Some people can step back and take a look at the whole situation and others cannot. Some people can point out misunderstandings, apologize, acknowledge their own wrong doings, and even help you see the error of your own thinking, and others cannot.

Yet, that never stopped me from writing. Through the good and the bad, I continued to write. Some years less often than others, but I wrote.

Even in school, my favorite subjects were always the ones that allowed me to write—and often the courses I excelled at. I may not have had the best imagination around, but oh, I did love to write. I loved putting words together to form sentences and sentences together to form paragraphs and paragraphs together to form complete papers. It didn’t matter what the subject was, writing was like an escape for me.

Yet, I never saw writing as a career and never thought to pursue it as such. I guess I didn’t realize that you could take your love of writing about the world around you and make a living at it. And considering the fact that I was more of an introvert than an extrovert, I didn’t see writing as a viable option. You would, after all, have to interview sources and you surely couldn’t get all your information from personal experience or other literature.

Now, years later, I write for a living. And it’s been such a tremendous blessing in my life. It has given me the flexibility to be a stay-at-home mom (something I’ve always dreamed of being) and a work-at-home mom (something I needed). It has allowed me the opportunity to volunteer in my children’s classrooms, to coddle them when they are home sick from school, and be home with them every summer. And when my husband worked nights, it allowed me the opportunity to have dates with my husband—during the day—without the need for a babysitter.

Yes, writing has always been a part of my life and always will.

So to all those wonderful people who’ve paid me to write content for their websites, their small businesses, their publications, and their catalogs, I thank you!

Thank you for allowing me to do something I love, for giving me the opportunity to grow as a writer, and for the ability to build my self-esteem as a human being. Thank you for showing me that I have value in this world, outside of being a mom and a wife and a friend. And thank you for letting me do it from the comfort of my home, where I could combine the best of both worlds: mom and career!

Give thanks…

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Magnets From Start To Finish

Saturday, July 18th, 2009 by Alyice

Have you ever taken a really bad photo and wanted to keep some aspect of it—an aspect that was just “too cute” to destroy? Perhaps it was a fuzzy faced baby who just happened to have the look that truly captures baby’s personality. Or perhaps it was a great family photo, only Aunt Jillian was yawning? Or an animal that just wouldn’t cooperate? Thanks to digital magic, I—as well as you—can take a rather lame photo, crop out the parts that make it unusable, enhance the salvaged part(s), take parts from one photo and put them into another photo, manipulate the photo digitally, then print the “perfect” picture.

I do it all the time—as do many professional photographers. In fact, I know a few professionals who say that today’s buyers demand perfection every time—they even expect professionals to digitally remove unsightly parts, perform plastic surgery, and enhance color schemes.

While I am no “professional”, I do have fun playing with both my camera and my digital darkroom. Take today, for example. Two months ago, I took a photo of a baby skunk. The skunk was originally in a wire cage. The zoo keeper, however, agreed to take the skunk out of the cage so I could get a “good” photo. Only one problem, the little guy was scared to death and would not stop clinging to the zoo keeper. I decided I’d just snap a few quickies and hope for the best. When I got home, I was disappointed because the photos were not only flat, but I didn’t get a good angle of the guy.

I was pretty bummed. I mean seriously, how often do you get to take a photo of a skunk up-close-and-personal and not have to fear being sprayed?

Today, I decided to play with the photo.

First, I tried to clean up the image by removing any digital noise, clarifying the image, and of course adjusting the contrast.
Next, I erased the background and replaced it with a solid color.
Then I cropped the image and resized it.
Next, I picked a different brush and added what looked like stars and fence posting.
Since I didn’t like the background color I chose to alter the color by using the “chalk” tool to soften the overall image.
It was looking better but still missing something so I added a fine paper texture to the image.
Then I used the magic wand tool to remove the skunk.
Next, I added three different textures, then replaced the skunk.
For some reason, the replacement no longer fit perfectly and left a tiny glow around the skunk. I decided I could live with that because it seemed to add something to the piece.
Next, I stamped over the existing stars so they could stand out more.
Then I used the magic want to cut out the skunk’s eye from the original photograph and pasted into the new photograph.
Next, I added a border.
Somewhere in the process the mouth got distorted so all you see is his white stripe—but for some reason it works.

I also played around and created these two wildlife magnets.

One day I am going to show you something really amazing, but for now it’s all about baby steps…

Keep Creating

Posted in Art How-Tos | 1 Comment »

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AlyiceEdrich.com
I'm a freelance writer, mixed media artist, SMVA, and the owner of The Dabbling Mum.

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