Thursday, November 18, 2010

A Little Background

Gloria Finds Trouble, 17 x 20 inches on antique clapboards, right. Original photoshop piece on left,

The Day Lady Arrived, 22 x 14 inches on antique clapboards, bottom. Original photoshop piece on top.

Mother's Day, 16 x 20 inches on antique clapboards, right. Original photoshop piece on left.

MY ART— These three pieces began as vintage black-and-white negatives. I scanned them and then worked on them in Photoshop. Colorizing them to begin with, I rendered them in a realistic manner. I then layered new floral images, shot by me, to the original photos. I played with the composition and color until I was happy with them. The next step is printing the images out in different sizes, and I will sometimes print color variations of them as well, pushing the magenta for one, and the cyan in another for example, or duotoning them instead of printing them in full color. I cut the printouts into squares, and reassemble the various pieces on my cardboard or wooden backgrounds. In this case, I had assembled antique clapboards and painted and sanded them in my style. I also added silver foil to them in strategic places. Once the images are applied to the wood, I continue my layering process, adding paint stripes on top of the entire piece, and I usually finish with a graphite grid, "holding" all of the disparate pieces together. 

I'm happy to say that these pieces on clapboards are my most popular pieces, and these three have been sold, along with two others. It's not easy to find the original, aged clapboards though, so I can't limit my work to these even if I wanted to.

5 comments:

  1. Casey, they're all really lovely! I envy the lucky people who now own these! What's a graphite grid, though? Not familiar with that. And thanks for explaining your process. It's fascinating. :)

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  2. It's a fancy way of saying I draw a gridwork over the entire piece, using a carpenter's leaded pencil. It's a bit shinier and a nice dark gray. They're soft too, for wooden surfaces, so I don't have to press down very hard. On the other hand, sometimes I use a wooden dowel I've shaped into a point, and press down very hard, to create an "invisible" grid of lines are just impressions in the wood, paint and paper.

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  3. Thank you! Of course! That makes perfect sense.

    Sweet dreams tonight, my artist friend. :)

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  4. Casey, you do one fine job showing the world not old your creativity, but hard work. This only proves that you have true passion in what you do without compensation.

    Btw, who is Gloria?

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  5. Gloria was Hoohoo's given name, but since I gave her that nickname, and she was Gloria as a little girl, I used that for the name of the piece. And Trouble was the name of the neighbor's black cat. Every black cat that old woman ever had was named Trouble, right up until the 1990s when she died!

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