Mixed media - digital styleee

I love mixed media. I love the lack of "rules".

There's no "we're doing acrylics today. No graphite. Pencils AWAY! I said acrylics, what do you want pastels for too?..." from an inflexible art tutor.

With mixed media you just take your pick of whatever takes your fancy. Like handfuls of your favourite sweets mixed together with ice cream and sauce....yum.

I have some digital download sheets of various ephemera, some from Etsy and some freebies from a lady over at malacima.blogspot.com.

I am going to print and use in 'physical' pieces, as I much prefer having something I can hold, and being able to feel the textures of all the different media, but playing with Photoshop is just as fun. I hadn't realised that there's a whole group of people out there doing Digital Scrapbooking! I guess they get their pages printed as photographs to put in an album. Stuff shouldn't just stay inside a screen, it needs to be made real. Which reminds me, that I have a huge pile of photographs to print.

Anyway, my offering today:



The girl is from a sheet purchased from 'Lisa's Altered Art' on Etsy. The newspaper wings are from malacima's Vintage Collage sheet. The bubbles from malacima's 'Autumn Mood' sheets. The background photo of the moon and sky is one I took nearly two years ago (I have hundreds, nay thousands, of unprocessed and unused images on my harddrive). I love how you can get texture using Photoshop filters, playing with different styles and intensities...but I'm still not convinced by digital collage. I want to run my hands over the textures and feel the 'canvas'. I also think it's much more therapeutic to actually use paintbrushes or crayons, to cut and stick, rather than just dragging a mouse around and clicking every now and again.

I'll probably print this onto card stock, and work into it with 'real' supplies.