Leanne Cole – Nicci Carrera

I was staring out the window daydreaming today, which I do a lot of as I work, when I decided I had to take a selfie. Do you know — day dreaming is very good! We think that work has to be grind, grind, grind, or else it isn’t work. But when we allow our minds some freedom we may come up with short cuts or brand new ideas that will make our work, work, work, actually be breakthrough instead of just more shavings off the same block.

The two unframed canvases in the background were done by my mom in an art class when she was just fooling around. I love them — there’s nothing like original oil paintings, even if they are just studies. The framed one is a composition by the artist, Leanne Cole. The link that I provided to Leanne’s blog will take you to the post that was selected for the honor of WordPress Freshly Pressed. Being Freshly Pressed is major and it is very well deserved by Leanne, whose work I obviously admire.

Leanne Cole did a great video on how to add textures to your photos. However, I have to leave my art self-education efforts out of my daily agenda right now.

While I don’t get to draw, paint and do photo enhancement at the moment, the concept of texture and shape has been on my mind for a while and a few items have entered my photo collection. There’s some texture but it wasn’t added, it was just there. Really what I’ve been thinking about doing is turning these into canvases, something I invented in Corel Painter Essentials. I will show some examples sometime.

A shell (white balance and color enhanced in GIMP):

This is a drain in the Champs de Mars park (where the Eiffel Tower is) in Paris. Decided to leave the photographer’s sneakers in there for a little more texture. 😉