hybrid art

digitally alter Gelli Prints

Mixing real paint, real paper and Photoshop has always worked for me. Photoshop allows me to fix things that are not quite right with my prints once they have dried. I can digitally erase or add things precisely where I want. What control I can have after making a fun mess with paint!

Each digital paper is created with SEVERAL layers in Photoshop. Various blending modes are used and sometimes I also adjust the colors a bit.

Here are some digital papers I made from that Gelli Print in my last post.

dinny's garden | digital paper dinny's garden | digital papers Be Mine dinny's garden | digital papers collage

All of these digital papers are available for sale at photoDUDS

photoDUDS | Be Mine Digital Paper Pack

hand carved stamps

My latest crush is on hand carving stamps. With my family’s birthday season in full swing, I was feeling inspired to make some helium balloons. With my vintage Speedball carver in hand I made 2 stamps. Check out that price… $2.55 and it’s made of WOOD!

vintage Speedball linoleum carving tool

I really love to take something like this and simply stamp them onto paper with plenty of space around each stamp. It’s fun to see how different each stamp turns out with a variety of textures.

hand carved balloon stamps

Then I scan at high resolution and use Photoshop to clean up. Now I have 10 balloons that look unique. For me, that’s the way life is and my art should reflect that. For something like this, I don’t like each thing to look the same. They ended up like this.

 

stamped balloons

These balloons are available in my ETSY store HERE

My FIRST hand carved stamp was made using that very Speedball carver. It was for my high school art class. That actual linoleum was ridiculously hard and impossible to do any fine detail. Born to Run was just released and this Springsteen fan bought the album. Miss Bernarden was not thrilled with my topic choice, but I actually sold a few prints to friends. This was WAY before ETSY!

vintage linoleum block cut

Inspiration that’s blooming now…

Lately, I’ve been having fun mixing “real world” art with the digital world and realizing just how much I enjoy it. Since I  started art journaling, my art style has evolved into something more artistic and less structured or “designed”. The freedom while art journaling is wonderful – NO rules to follow and the only person I need to make happy is myself.

For  a future photoDUDS release I’ve been playing in paint and using my Gelli Arts Plate. SO many prints were created, I just couldn’t stop. By scanning the best bits, I have the control to position elements the way I want in Photoshop. That is freedom too!

Here are some of the bits after I have combined them in Photoshop.

dinny digital designs painted mixed media Photoshop

dinny digital designs painted mixed media Photoshop

dinny digital designs painted mixed media Photoshop

These are going to be 16×20 templates. Here are some of the details.

dinny digital designs painted mixed media Photoshop

dinny digital designs painted mixed media Photoshop

How I use watercolors in my digital designs.

I like to incorporate real watercolors into my digital designs. It gets me away from the computer {for a short time} AND I can get messy. My initial inspiration for this product was a repeating triangular shape. I didn’t have any real color scheme in mind because I figured I could make it whatever colors I wanted later in Photoshop.

140223_watercolor011

I drew a hexagonal shape with pencil on my watercolor paper and started painting. I couldn’t let that extra space go to waste, so I drew parallel lines on and figured I could fit a few  smaller triangles. What was I thinking, I could totally be more efficient in my use of space! So I did a little math and tried this.

140223_watercolor003

I really liked the direction this was going. But, I could get MORE triangles from a sheet of paper if they were smaller. So I did these.

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I really started to like the colors. I did a few more sheets of triangles, in similar colors. Some of the triangle I did not like – but that’s what Photoshop is for. I erased the pencil lines before scanning. Here is the photoDUDS card I created with these watercolor triangles. I removed some of the triangles with a mask in Photoshop.

140223_Mosaic_triangles

photos: Beth Forester Photography

MOSAIC, senior grad cards will be available in the photoDUDS store on Thursday. There are 8 different designs in the set, all with similar water color designs. I also painted some squares.