Nicci Art school, Australia, High Sierra, Local, Paris, Travel

2013 retrospective part 2

As I said yesterday, through my daily blog I discovered or re-discovered my enjoyment of the arts. In looking back I discovered that I seek out art when I’m traveling.

New York is a gold mine for art. 

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Paris is amazing:

Sculpture by Cezanne outside Louvre Cathedral de Notre Dame Bust at the time of Venus de Milo Feature Venus de Milo Ain Ghazal

And Amsterdam is heaven for art lovers, too:

I didn’t go inside any museums in Australia. I would like to do that some day, but I didn’t need to go inside to find art there:

Tomorrow is new year’s eve in the United States and I’ll do my final post of the year about the people I’ve met through blogging and what I’ve learned from others through blogging.

Nicci Art school, Australia, High Sierra, Local, Paris, Travel

2013 retrospective

Leanne Cole inspired me to use the waning days of 2013 to reflect upon the year. I want do this, particularly since this was my first year of blogging.

I do have one more award to post, but I’m going to do that on January 5, on my blogging anniversary.

I know that my blogging style has changed since I started. When I first started, I tried being edgy.

Because I blog every day, though, the “real me” came out quickly and I settled into a pattern of… the arts, I guess. Photography, digital art, book reviews, poetry. In that order, really. Well, travel too, certainly, but I think after I get the photos up from the travels, I like to settle in and spend some time working with the images artistically.

Ravenswood
Ravenswood, Queensland AustraliaRavenswood
Ravenswood, Queensland Australia
DSC00239_Painting
Port Lonsdale, Victoria Australia
Snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef
Snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef
SONY DSC
Before the storm, Saratoga
Impressions 8_Painting
Amsterdam
Bikes_Painting 3
Amsterdam
Horse at the park
Paris
Paris Impressions 1
Paris
At the park 2 Painting Paris
Paris

I’ll post tomorrow about other ways that I think my interest in art came out through blogging. Then I’d like to talk a bit about the people I’ve met through blogging and what I’ve learned from others through blogging.

Nicci Art school, High Sierra, Travel

A painting from Barker Pass, near Tahoe

This took a few hours. The software wasn’t making a good painting out of one of the wildflowers pictures. Finally I did one on Corel Painting Essentials 3 Defaults, then restored detail to the foreground. The restore detail doesn’t seem to be working right in the other painting types. I thought it was just me, but when, with the defaults setting, restore detail started working as shown in the demo video, I concluded there’s something off with the other programs. Anyway, this is art, so I’m not going to worry about precision. I wanted it kind of loose anyway.

I spent a lot of time in Paris making canvases out of photos. I would run one of the painting programs but stop it before it finished. Then I would smear it and then save it as jpg, then use that as a canvas for a digital painting.

With that in mind, I tried making the painting of the wildflowers and opening that in GIMP. Then I opened another Barker Pass photo, one that had just shale rocks in the foreground. I pasted it and then fiddled with the transparency using Color to Alpha. I have no idea what that means. I didn’t bother to look it up because I like how the visually simple rocks in the foreground let the flowers come through and the flowers look like rain, while the smeary background in the wildflowers picture made for a textured sky.

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Nicci Art school, High Sierra, Travel

Something different

There have been a lot of snow pictures in the blogosphere lately, so here is something from summer. I took this in 2011 near Barker Pass in the high Sierra above Lake Tahoe. That was a very heavy, late winter and the snow persisted through July. The late melt fed the wildflowers into an opus of Nature, like she’d come out to show the competition that we humans can never compete! Oh, the Keukenhof Gardens (see posts under Keukenhof Gardens on my Travel page), arguably come close, but even they can’t cover hundreds of miles with this:

P1000301_Painting