Day 4 A single word focus

Day 4 Beyond Layers Task: Think of one single word, mood or thought...... and then set out to create a photo around your theme.

Work Always - Day 21

A work of art is a world in itself,

reflecting senses and emotions of the artist’s world.

Hans Hofmann

Art is a spiritual path for some, a way to reflect on what is within us, and on what is important in our lives, a way to grow. We need to commune, to communicate with others. Speaking words calls for a listener, just as an author longs to be read, and just as making art calls for a viewer. We can be own listener or our own viewer (as in a diary) and this can be all the purpose of our art. But when someone else shares this communication with us we feel “listened to”. One comment is enough for me to feel that someone has listened, and the satisfaction of seeing my blog grow with an archive of my own work helps too.

If we have the opportunity to have many comments or be featured somewhere (like a gallery exhibition) we feel affirmed, that we have said through our art something timeless and beautiful, or relevant to others. I'd be proud of that, but it's the process of becoming myself that's most important, and seeing how my work is changing and growing with me as I learn more techniques and sensibilities.

The artists I choose to be my guides or inspiration (like you, Kim!) help us begin the process, but it's those who take it further to produce something uniquely their own who are truly artists. I feel that I'm in the 'copying the master' stage, but the skills I am learning excite me and give wings to my own ideas.

Kim's excerpt from Julia Cameron's Artist Way is a relief:

'As artists we wish we could always work well, but we must settle for always. The 'always' we can control. The 'well' we cannot control. For this reason, we do well simply to serve, to focus more on the process of doing our work than on the 'product' of work produced.'

So here is a treasure of my heart... 

A Week of Colour

Day 19 of kim Klassen's Beyond Layers course set the challenge of a colour a day for a week. Since I'm so behind, I did a storyboard of my colours, using pics I've taken in the past year.

Day 18 Black and White tips

Well, after experimenting by changing to monochrome setting on my camera, I hear from Kim's next lesson in Beyond Layers that I shouldn't limit my picture by committing to black and white. Kim gives so much information and so many ideas that I am blown away by the possibilities. I've chosen to do only a few of the ideas as my picture felt finished.

Here I took a colour portrait that I've always liked and converted it to black and white in Photoshop Elements 9. I played with Camera Raw, healed a few spots that had scanned on, and added a texture - Kim's Graduation Day in Multiply mode at about 50 % opacity.



Next I took a black and white photo I had taken in an old Australian country cemetery and experimented in Camera Raw. I added Kim's Aurora texture in Soft Light mode at about 20%.