{creative soul}

Mojo Monday: Mood Boards!

Good Monday morning to you!! It is a beautiful fall morning here — cool & crisp and wonderful! No matter how bad a night's sleep I get, (which seems to be happening more and more as I approach a "certain age" —ahem!) I always feel happy when I drive Ellie to school then come into my new studio. There is something fresh and wonderful about it.

The drive to school is so much fun because even though the girl's are crabby because it's early and I'm crabby because of the traffic, I love hearing them chat about school, horses, etc! Then, when I come into my studio, I love opening the door and seeing everything being right where I left it night before and that my dogs haven't chewed my artwork again! LOL!  That alone can lift your spirits, right? ;-)

This morning as I sat down in front of computer with my latte (bad habit!) and wondered what to blog about, I thought MOOD BOARDS!!! I have, of late, become a sort of Mood Board Junkie!

Now, I've always used these for my design work and for my paper designing but I called them "inspiration pieces". I used to cut out pictures from magazines and post them in a journal and called it my "personal discovery journal" (you'd be surprised at how the images in that journal have manifested in my life over the years!), and, of course, I now have a giant inspiration board in my office on which I hang artwork, photos and quotes that speak to me. Here's a picture of it...

 

I first heard of the term "Mood Board" in an online class I am taking on Surface Pattern Design. Artists are given Mood Boards to help inspire them visually in color and theme and hone in on a design or collection. An interior designer can use them when decorating a space and writers also use mood boards when developing a storyline.

According to Wikipedia, "A mood board is a type of collage that may consist of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator. Designers and others use mood boards to develop their design concepts and to communicate to other members of the design team."

Mood boards can be done digitally of course, in fact, Pinterest, is basically a changing, organic, digital and highly addictive mood board (don't get me started on Pinterest or I may never finish this post!) :-) but they can also be created using physical items.

Here's a mood board  which is essentially a photo of a physical mood board that someone created —brilliant! I just love the color here..

Next, is a digitally created mood board for interior design for a child's nursery...

And here is one for a Rustic Kitchen

They can range from the eclectic...

To the more traditional...

Here is a mood board just for Fall that I love...

And, if you are on Pinterest, visit my Mood Board board! :)

Here is a snapshot of it...

Okay, now I dare you not to go out and create a Mood Board, in whatever format you want! Excuse me while I go visit a certain website that starts with a P and ryhmes with "Interest". Tee hee...

Happy Creating!
xo
N

Mojo Monday: Nature Sketchbook

Hello! Happy Monday to you... it is a gorgeous fall day here in Michigan and I'm very blessed to have a park near my studio where I can walk, jog or bike. Right now, the leaves are just beginning to change and even though it's warm & sunny here there is a little crispness to the air, which I just love!

Today, I am working on an online class and one of the assignments was to sketch with pen, pencil or whatever medium you wish, items that you find in nature. I decided to head out on my walk to collect whatever caught my fancy. I love flowers, but I was looking for more wispy, twigs and leaves. First, I started off from my office and headed out to Hines Park. The evidence of fall was all around me...

On my walk I found a lot of goodies! Once I got back to the studio, I sorted through them and picked out my favorites.

Next, I sketched them using a combination of marker and graphite. I really enjoyed this process. I'm not sure where it will lead, but it helped me to view nature in a different way and I came up with some great motifs that I may use in a scrapbook paper or other surface pattern design down the road.

I hope you enjoyed this process and that you might choose to use it in your own work. Taking pictures really helps too, esp. since some of these may dry and out and change their look later on (which may lead to a cool and totally different motif!)

Hugs!
N

Create your own brushes using your iPad!

I am in love with the Paper53 app on my iPad. I love to "draw" while laying in bed. It's not as satisfying as feeling the paint on my hands, but it is close second and it gives me unlimited possibilities to practice my art without wasting paper, paint or canvas. I really like the interface of Paper53 and the watercolored look and just recently they added a color mixer so the color possibilities are endless.

But one of my favorite things to do with Paper53 is to create lettering using the calligraphy tool in black. I use my stylus (or finger) to doodle words or graphic that I want to turn into brushes in Photoshop.

In the app, you create multiple "journals" to house your creations and when you are done you can email a .pdf file to yourself that you can in turn import into Photoshop....

After you email your journal.pdf, you go into Photoshop and import. >File > Open and find your .pdf file.

Let's import each page from our journal as an Image... so select the button that says Images and then select all the images from your journal. Click OK.

Once you have all these files opened in Photoshop, let's save them off as .jpgs for importing into Illustrator. If you don't have Illustrator, don't worry you can just create your brushes from the imported files.

However, I noticed that tracing them through Illustrator renders a crisper and larger image. If you want to use your imports, change the DPI (dots per inch) to 600 at the time you import.

If you have Illustrator, let's open the jpg files that we saved off from Photoshop in that program and trace them.

Bring up the Image Trace Window and select the Black and White Logo Preset and Black & White for the Mode. Click Trace.

Then click Expand to convert our design to paths.

Next select >Object >Ungroup and delete the white background...

Finally, select an area of your artwork that has a white fill, then choose >Object >Select> Same Fill & Stroke and hit the Delete button. This gets rid of any white fills in your art.

You can now save this off as an .ai file for later use or you can Select All and then Copy & Paste it back into Photoshop. From here you can use it as is, or create your brush set for later use, by selecting >Edit >Define Brushset.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I'd love to see your brushes that you created using this technique!

I also created this little freebie for you to use... it is in .png format. You can download it here. This is part of a larger set of brushes coming to the shoppe soon!

Have a great day!
N

 

Halloween color schemes....

I don't know why I love the fall so much! Could be the cooler temps, the beautiful fall colors, the gray, steely skies full of fluffy clouds, leaves falling... oh I could go on and on! But this time of year really speaks to my soul.

It's probably no mistake then, that Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I know it is mostly celebrated in the US and not all religions recognize this time of year, but I find so much joy in preparing for it, seeing the kids all dressed up and handing out (and eating) all the candy. I also love designing Halloween goodies!

I am currently working on a new halloween set and was looking for unique color schemes and turned again to vintage art to come up with these. I thought I'd share them with you! They are simplistic but I think very effective. I really like the simplicity and tone of the second one...but the third one could be pretty for a general fall set.

Happy Haunting!

Nancie

Pssst. I have a secret....

That I can't quite share with you yet but I can tell you that I am very excited about this coming Tuesday!

:-} Hint: I am designing again and it feels great!

xoxo
N.

Paper Heaven....

My favorite place to go when I'm in Ann Arbor, besides Zingermans (for the BEST turkey reuben you'll ever eat!), is Hollanders. They are a paper arts store and besides having everything paper (stationary, scrapbooking, cards, clip art books, crafting and arts books), they also hold classes in altered art, mixed media art journals, book-binding and even letterpress. Of course, I've taken many of these classes! LOL! But that was years ago. I just picked up their workshop schedule and may head back for a class or two this fall.

Anyway, the other day when I visited Hollanders, I took pictures of their papers for inspiration both in color and design combinations. Here they are in all their iPhone photo glory for you! Some are kinda blurry but they are all so gorgeous, aren't they?

 

Enjoy!
xoxo
N.

Greetje Feenstra

Good morning! I am off to my weekly torture at the gym, but I was surfing through Art.com today for some inspiration and came across this amazing artist that I had to share with you!

Greetje Feenstra's painting are so ethereal and gorgeous. I love the way she crops her painting in so tight and all the wonderful texture and softness, don't you?

My favorite painting is this one because if you look closely she is using gold leaf! LOVE IT!

But check out her other work at Art.com

 

Sigh.

xoxo

N.

What I learned yesterday...

at the Pshop CS5 class could fill a book, or er, a 6 hour class! LOL!  The class was great and I did learn alot. Since it was geared toward mostly photographers, some of the stuff about Camera Raw and HDR were over my head. But the section of Photo Stylings were awesome! Plus, at the end of class Ben taught us how to make actions and all the tricky things that could happen with them.

Besides advanced HDR (high definition resolution) and the new mini-bridge, the coolest thing about CS5 is this thing called "Content Aware Fill". If you have something missing in your picture, like sky or rocks, you just select the blank area and under Fill, choose Content Aware. It acts like a really smart clone tool and fills in the sky and rocks for you. You can also use this to take things out of your photo that you don't want, like electrical lines or a sign.The results were not perfect, but they drew some oooohs and ahhhs from the audience. From a geek standpoint, it was pretty awesome. 

The new puppet warping feature allows you to take an object and map on it where it might bend and move. Ben animated an armadillo tail and it was cool but I could not figure out how I might use Puppet Warping in my work, except maybe to change the perspective on an element.

Refine Edge is revamped for CS5 and is really useful for extracting hair things like Fibers, yarn and such.

The new beta 6.1 version Camera Raw (available at labs.adobe.come) has a very powerful feature which can take a fish eye lens image and flatten it out. I imagine this may be used in reverse to create some "Lens Baby" affects? But I think I took a potty break about then so I missed how to reverse it! :)

Like I said the section on Photo Stylings and Actions were well worth the class and more directly applicable to how I use Photoshop, and I hope to share what I learned here with you. The one thing I was really excited about yesterday is why I always get geeked about Kelby seminars... the deals! I signed up for a year-long access at KelbyTraining.com for about $100 off the price and got almost $500 in free dvds and books! I picked up Scott's CS4 Down and Dirty Tricks and his Digital Photography series, as well as some Corel Painter tutorials by Fay Sirkis.

Now I just need to sit down and take the time time learn plus upgrade to CS5! 

xoxo
N.

Photoshop CS5!!

I am so excited today to be able to attend Photoshop CS5 for Photographers. It's put on by Kelby Training. If you don't know who Scott Kelby is he writes and teaches about Photoshop. He is such a great teacher and has a wonderful sense of humor. Today's class is taught by Ben Wilmore and it's all about the latest version of PS. I'm excited because I only have CS3 and I want to know if I should upgrade. Plus I'm hoping to learn some cool tricks that I can pass on here. xoxo N