Playing with clay

I went back to pottery last year after a long hiatus. If only there was real money in being a ceramic artist!

My earliest attempt

I’m listening to the Cranberries and looking at old photos. I suddenly had a moment while I was putting away laundry (yes, how exciting) when I realised that I hadn’t looked at my pictures from when I first got a digital camera, in Grade 10, for a long long time. In fact (moment of panic), I wasn’t sure where they were. I found them!

And I also found this — part of my my high school final art project. My earliest foray into altering digital pics.

The one I submitted:

The other option:

This is the original picture I took in my kitchen:

Me, Myself and I

I think a lot of us may have run into the same problem. Photoshop is an amazing program, but it’s really easy to make really awful images on it! I tried at first to superimpose myself onto other pictures, but that just looked terrible. Then I just started playing around with what I would generally like to do with my own art. I like series. I really love those photo booths you can take pictures in in the subways. I like Andy Warhol’s triptychs and other repetitive images. So I figured that maybe I could play around with the colours on some pictures that look as though they were taken in a photo booth.

What I did in Photoshop is as follows:

I took the four pictures and copied them all into the same file, resizing them to be the same size. Then I applied the diffuse glow filter to each picture. After that I adjusted the colour balance in each of the four layers – one more blue, yellow, red and green. I also created the grey border with the rectangle tool. There were a few more trial and error-type steps that I won’t include in here because I hit the undo button a whole lot of times.

Simplicity wins!

…and the pictures I used: