Another process from the class at ICP

The "tattered" edges are deliberate, as a matter of fact, I am wishing there was more "tattering"

This was shot at the Chelsea Market, and it uses the DASS Special Sauce and Stone Paper. I am not sure where Mary got hers, but I ordered some from Etsy. What this photo can't show is how translucent the image is on that paper, it looks like it is floating on it. I think the surface of the image is a bit "soft" or fragile still, and I am thinking that I may frame it but will for sure use a mat to keep the glass off it.

Overall, though, it is one of my favorites.

Purell Transfers

One of the easiest transfers uses Purell as the transfer medium. The hard part is maybe finding a brand of transparency that will "give up" its ink to the paper. I was playing around with some that I already had, and found that IBM Injet Transparencies worked like a charm. Having made the transfer, however, I had to work back into them ... why? Because I COULD! I liked these two tries.

The sunflower has the following added to the Purell transfer: Peerless Watercolor, Lyra watersoluble crayons and some beeswax crayons that I found in my stash.

The Koi has the same except no beeswax crayons.

In printing terms, this was a second. There was still ink left on the Transparency sheet so I tried it again with fresh Purell to see if it would come off. Especially interesting to me was the pink where the blue had been before. I didn't add that, it was what appeared in place of the blue. I did go back into the Koi with watersoluble crayons and used the watercolors to smear stuff off the edges.

This was an insane attempt to use the "wrong" side of the transparency sheet to see if it would work. The answer was no and this is prettymuch a total re-creation of some smearey ink... but cute, so I kept it.

I am excited I got this to work.. Hooray!

Class project

Gill has been posting about the class we took together at the International Center for Photography last week. She is SOOO much more organized than I am, but this was one of the most interesting parts for me and I had to finish it at home because I was not lugging the "substrate" AKA Deco Glass Block all the way from 181st Street to Midtown to apply the imagery. SO, here it is, a partial success, not quite what I had in mind.

The project involved creating a "skin" using acrylic medium and inkAID on a flexible polyethyene sheet AKA a kitchen chopping mat. There was where I went a bit amok. I used a pearlescent inkAID and I should have used clear. The vision was that after I printed onto the skin I would end up being able to use clear acrylic medium to attach the prints onto the block (up to here it worked fine) and you would be able to see the bridge through the trees and vice versa (that's where the pearlescent inkAID did me in).

However, that said, the block is still interesting no matter which side you look at, and I can do it again as I have another block and some clear inkAID on its way.  The first set of pictures have a regular light bulb on the block and the second set have daylight.

I am showing it here so you can see how it came out and maybe have a sense of where my brain was going when I started this project.  Besides, I think Gill would email me once a week til I did it, sort of like a Tickler File Memo!

ok, so I am taking a class this week

However, Gill is documenting it much better than I am. As a matter of fact if you want your life to be examined carefully and artfully and to be able to understand what your life is doing day to day... call her and get her to document it FOR you. It is a wondrous experience.

I, on the other hand, do quick shots of food. Or of potential food...

I do shots of Madison Park Fountains after we ate. (Gill documented the food too, so if you want to see my life go look at her blog and envy me.)

I did take a picture of Echo....

Unfortunately for me, Gill went to her hotel and I TRIED to go home via the Columbus Circle Subway stop. Seems there was an "unattended package" in the center of Columbus Circle behind the Columbus Column. That meant that ALL of Columbus Circle was closed to everyone, and a man in a protective suit was marching across the street as I got there.

Added a bit to my trip home, and I am QUITE sure that if Gill had been there she would have interviewed the police and they would have been posing for pictures and letting her try on the protective gear. Me? they just said lady, you can't just stand there, you have to move one way or another......

One of the pitfalls to having Gill document your life is that you get used to it and expect her to be there all the time. Sigh...

I DO promise a couple of pictures of my results by the end, but if you want insight into what I am doing, see Gill.

words

from http://www.wordle.net/

Once more, with pictures

Company coming all week, so I may be among the missing for a bit, but one more quick trip through the Gertrude Stein apartment filled with art hung in salon-style that I now am living in and loving.

The wall over my desk holds Japanese wood-block prints.
There is the view out the window of the GWB with the sky turning turquoise.
Down the entry hall are cyanotypes and hand colored versions of my photographs. Two of my collages, with another over the shrine, above.

Black and white photography.I think the nicest part of this is that most of the art is my own creation, except for the Japanese prints. They have always had a big influence on me and now they are all out where I can see them. When I get the next spurt of energy, I am going to hang my big pastel paintings of figures in the bedroom.

Stage Two

http://abovethegwbphoto.blogspot.com/2008/01/blog-post.html

At the very beginning there was that post. It drove Pauline to speculate about how long it would take me to get them all hung up..


As of lunch on Tuesday, Joey and Aaron had 16 pictures up. After lunch, the pace picked up a LOT:






In the end, Sienna approved and this part looked like this.

There were two sections of the entrance

The kitchen... are you exhausted yet?

And finally, since they were at 38 pictures and they wanted what is probably a world record of 40, they added 2 more to the living room.

Tomorrow, the overall view.

What a great Birthday!! Thanks guys!!

It was Joey's birthday and I got the presents

Tuesday was Joey's birthday and he and Aaron gave me a huge present.

It started like this:

They had a lot of help from their friends.

There was a lot of testing and trying things out.

This was the end of Stage One - 16 Pictures off the floor and onto the wall.

We thought that the molding hooks look like musical notes up there playing a tune.

Then we took a break for lunch. I cooked, which is a good thing because I am WAY too short to help hang pictures unless there is a really BIG ladder.

I am really going to miss Polaroid film

This is an emulsion lift on top of an image transfer, both my photos from ages ago. I shot a lot of slides and used them to make image transfers. I never did many emulsion transfers but I always did love this one. I'm going to miss that film a LOT.

more of old photos

This was shot by my father, he was a camera buff back in the days of 120 film and funky lighting. He never had an enlarger, so this was originally contact printed by laying the film directly on the photographic paper and shining light on it for a controlled bit of time.

I am now doing something similar but updated, printing out scanned negatives onto overhead transparency film and laying them on top of prepared paper and exposing them with either the sun or with daylight lamps. This one is one of mine.


This one is waiting for inspiration, though I really just like it as is. If you read the Narnia books, it is like the lampost in Narnia to me..

Do you have photos that haunt you?

Are there photos that sick in your mind and you pause everytime they show up in your screensaver or you flip past them in an old album?

I have several. I keep coming back to them over and over thinking there is something else I could do with them. Most of them are from my past and my parent's lives. I have combined them into single pictures like the one I used in the Holga-ized pictures. I still stare at those two pictures, me as a child and my mother as a young woman and wonder what else I could do with them. There is another picture of me that has a similar effect.. I was the first born, so there are a LOT of pictures of me...but this one also sticks with me...

I don't know what I was doing or thinking, but it is pure me, I have no doubt.

Another picture that haunts is one from much later in my life, when I was a young, broke, single parent. I had a roommate and ultimately she got married. I was big on photography even then because it was cheap entertainment.

This one is of the roommate on her wedding day. I LOVE it and have played with it endlessly in photoshop. Two things I have done with it follow the original.

In the middle one, I combined it with a photo of her soon to be (and still is) husband that I took on the same day, and in the bottom one.. Subway angel.. she is combined with an empty NY Subway car wearing wings that were decorations on a building near where I lived. I have made a full size negative of the bottom one, printed it from my computer, and printed it as a cyanotype. The finished product there looked like this:

Does anyone else have a "haunting" image? Show it on your blog, I am dying to see what intrigues you.

Altered Slides

A while ago, I found a box of slides that I had originally taken to make Polaroid Image Transfers. Some I just didn't think would work, so I got to playing with them and made altered slides. I scanned them, and these three stood out as fairly successful to me. Feedback anyone?

Polaroid is no longer going to make their film..... doesn't mean much to lots of people, makes me sad. Fuji is still making film that can be used for image transfers, but it isn't the same. I hope someone takes it over to keep it going as a boutique film. Seems odd to have the idea of a boutique film, doesn't it?

I guess I should stockpile it???

If I can find it at all, I guess I should. Maybe a trip to B and H next week.

Holga

I am playing with some "filters" on some of my photographs. I have a fascination with graveyard angels and find them whenever I go anywhere there is a graveyard that I can get to. This fellow was in Binghamton NY, where there are a lot of angels in one cemetery. The photo has been "holgaized" including the everpresent light leak. It wasn't shot with my Holga. Mine doesn't have a great light leak, but I suppose one could be arranged!