So much catching up to do...

It's been way too long since I've posted on this blog, as some of you keep reminding me.  Lots of distractions, lots on my plate, lots of procrastination: these are my lame excuses.  Before I knew it, two and a half months flew by, so now I have lots of to catch up on.

Way back in early March, we had our first "Altered Images" class.   I made name-tags for everyone, using pictures from a 1958 high school yearbook.  The hairstyles and glasses and funny phrasing cracked me up, and I had fun making the silly tags. (click on any image to enlarge.)

We had a pretty awesome group of ladies in this class--all very creative, and all very fun people.  Here's the dream class:

We started the evening with a collage challenge.  I had assembled folders for everyone, each containing a "hero"/main image, along with somewhat-coordinating bits and pieces of papers and such.  Each packet was quite different, and some were a bit more random than others.  Some students were inspired by the components they received; others were a bit frustrated.  But it was a good exercise to take limited elements, layer them, arrange and rearrange them until finding a satisfying composition.

We talked a bit about basic composition and balance principles,  and I showed a bunch of examples for inspiration.  I think the results were terrific!  Like I said, we had some pretty crafty, creative students:

We spent the majority of our class time on this first experimental project, so we had precious little time left to get to what was supposed to be the nitty-gritty of the class, altering images.  I sped through some ideas for tweaking and embellishing photographs of people.  I love to take an image, scan it, convert it to black and white if necessary, and print it out on matte photo stock with my inkjet printer.  The paper's surface is wonderful for adding colored pencil touches.  It accepts waxy Prismacolor pencils like a dream.

I also like to add other elements to the photo to further alter it:  butterfly wings, hats, different clothes, etc., adding touches of whimsy and a little quirkiness.  I wish we had had more time to play with photos, but class went by too quickly.  We squeezed in some attempts:

We think that next time we offer this class, it would be good to expand it to two evenings, to allow plenty of lab time for experimenting.  Maybe this fall we'll try it again.  Not sure we'll be able to match this great group of ladies again, however!