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.

Webcams and Emin's bed

I have a new laptop, after my old one died in a pot noodle related incident.
This new one is great, brilliant for all things media...except it's going to have to go back. It restarts itself randomly, driving me to distraction.
The brand support are useless, sending 'copied and pasted' responses, and giving up after step 1 and 2 don't work. I would continue sending them 'will somebody PLEASE answer me', but I fear I'll be ignored even more (is that possible?) for sounding like a crazed computer-support-attention-seeking weirdo.

Anyway, that wasn't the point. I have this new laptop, and it has an integrated webcam. I knew this but hadn't really thought about it...I've never used a webcam in my life, and had no desire to. I'm a photographer for a reason, I like being behind the camera. This webcam isn't so easy to ignore though, as when it cycles through screensavers, the laptop decides to show the webcam view not in one screen, not even two screens, but three, just in case I have narcissistic tendencies, perhaps.

I don't.

My image scares me.

My beloved husband pointed out that I would need to work out how to turn it off, in case someone hacked in and was watching me. I'd never even considered that before, but I suppose there are crazy people out there, and maybe people would get a kick out of that sort of thing. We then got talking about all the webcams that you can 'watch' live online around the clock. I find it a bit weird. A bit voyeuristic...

There must be some people who are comfortable with this though, or they wouldn't set up their webcam so that the worldwide internet surfing population could watch their every move. I have no desire to watch what happens in someone's lounge/kitchen, especially not bathroom/bedroom. That's just creepy.

It made me think about Tracy Emin's bed though. The installation that she set up at the Tate, and how it got such a marmite reaction. I never saw it, I just read about it and saw photographs, so I never had the whole voyeuristic experience.

Photo from http://www.nhuhuy.com/

I kind of wish I had seen it though, as I think my reaction to the exhibit would be very telling of how much I can deal with voyeuristic tendencies in myself. I believe we all have them, but I don't believe that we can all accept that it's natural to have them. Of course, accepting that these tendencies are part of what make us human doesn't mean going overboard with our use of them.

Would I have stayed back from the installation, feeling an imaginary wall that stopped me from getting too close into someone else's personal space? Or would I have rationalised that Emin had placed it there, I had gone to see it, so I had every right to have a good poke around? I'm really not sure.

I just know that I would never put my mess out for all to see. I'm too embarassed. I also think some things should be kept private. Yet I still find this exhibit fascinating, and wish I could have seen it.

I cannot seem to reconcile this.

I don't want images from my webcam viewable, yet I kind of have a weird fascination with what may be out there for me to sit and watch, without anyone knowing I am doing so. Hypocritical?

Interestingly enough, there is an exhibit at the Tate Modern next year exploring these themes... "Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera"
You can read the press release put out last month here
I absolutely MUST get down to London for that one.

Interesting that they are not just including the obvious, the CCTV footage for example. Nan Goldin's work is an obvious and exciting choice, but Cartier-Bresson? Candid photography? I guess that could be classed as voyeuristic too, in a way, it would certain come under some shade of a 'surveillance' definition.

I enjoy candid photography. Some people criticize, citing lack of respect, privacy... maybe because it's another form of voyeurism, and people just aren't comfortable with the idea of it.

An Arty Party!

Come join me!

I dream of throwing an enormous party in the most fabulously inspiring location, with everyone who is open and willing to be creative. We would paint and draw and craft and photograph. We would talk and share. We would find that artistic spark that has probably been lost, and nurture it. There would be no room for arty farty...none of that pretentious self-important "high" or "fine" art. Everyone can be an artist: you just have to make art. How you define your art is up to you.