Whither Goest Thou, Little Blog?

After my earlier spring burst of energy I see that I am becoming a stranger to my own blog or "my little blog" as my daughter calls it.....her voice dripping with sarcasm, she will ask "so, are you going to post that to your little blog, mom?"  Yes, I tell her, and I don't care if nobody actually reads it, it's a way for me to record my thoughts and to take pictures of my projects, or make GIMP pictures that are my projects.  Already I'm starting to go back to my earliest postings and use them for instruction or inspiration.  I've learned to use the blog mostly for art and rarely for personal agonizing over life.  Facebook was intended for that!  :-)

But right now I'm taking a mental vacation from GIMP.  I need to reorganize my digital images and think where I want to go next with them.  I've taken several series of shots with the camera (and not my Crappy Cell Phone ©) but haven't been able to download them from Z's computer to mine.  Also mine is running out of space and I need to find a better place to back up my images, so I keep putting off any pixel-heavy projects for fear that I jam the whole thing up.  Plus the garden is stealing a lot of my attention, and our constant attempts to clean and reorganize the house.  I'm hoping to complete a major webpage update and database update at work so I can make my mark on future administrations after I retire.  :-)  (In reality they will look at all my efforts, find it lacking in sophistication and will hire an outside contractor to do it right....)

So, what shall I blog about?  I'm going to keep coming back to this page and adding ideas throughout the day.

1. Make the blog more functional as a reference.  Keep working on craft and other links in the Pages.
[working on this HERE and it's finally coming along. Eventually all crafts will be represented here and the dyeing page will be dying]

2. Start working on images mentioned above and blog them.  Hope the whole thing doesn't come crashing down.

3. Make images in Illustrator to transfer to GIMP and document this.

4. Get a handle on what actual craft projects I want to work on.....if I have projects, they will get blogged, one way or another.

5. Blog posts on some of my more obscure Pinterest categories, like lucet braiding, ganutell, regional Hungarian embroidery.  Blog not just the methods but show the best web sources for further information.  Have a standard framework for these posts: Title, several images, history, best websites, link to my Pinterest collection and link to useful Pinterest and Google searches.

6. Experiment with making my own html and pasting it into Blogger.  Understand what constraints are necessary for it to show properly in Blogger.

7. Collect my Crappy Cell Phone © shots and blog them.  Low res, low tech, low hassle.

more anon....

Flickr: the lost photos

So Flickr decided at last to give us all more space, and those photos that I had submitted while I had membership are now free to view again.  Yay!

So I immediately started pulling down some of my favorites onto my desktop to repost here.  That worked for the seven images seen here and then POOF! it stopped working.  Instead of dragging the image off of Flickr and on to the desktop, only the web reference dragged and I got a bunch of links that were useless for posting.  Wahhhh??  What is strange is not that I can't drag them down now but that the system let me do it for several photos and then clamped down.

I've since found that they assume you can "right click" on things, and my laptop no comprendo "right click".  So I'm stuck for that route, but have since figured out I can e-mail them to myself, image by image.  Fehhh.  Well, that will keep me from posting any but those images I really, really love.  Probably just as well.

Here are a few to start with.  These are mostly flower images, though there is also a large group of Mendocino Family Camp photos from several years ago and a smaller group of cats when they were kittens photos that have great personal SQUEEE value.

Hollyhock center:

Gladiolus stalk: 

Relentlessly cheerful zinnia:

The pattern in the center of a Shasta Daisy:

Backlit tropical leaf....maybe my bush ageratum.

Miniature rose, mmmm:

Zee's photo enhancement of my silene photo.

Da's it for now.  I see a lot of inspiration for future GIMP projects based on isolated flower and leaf shapes, patterns from same, etc.  I want to make a digital danmala out of bits of flower and leaf images. In fact, I've been planning that long before I had heard the term "danmala", which I assume is a variant of mandala.

Time for new blogging projects, now that summer is here.  But the garden and the house keep winning the battle for my spare time....Time also to visit my brother in Oregon....need to steal a decent camera to take pictures.  Retirement countdown: a year and a couple of weeks.  Will get more precise as time goes on.

Bedroom Reorg. FAIL!

but I dug up and planted a strip of garden near the driveway with the plants I bought from the Merritt College Horticulture Department plant sale and Annie's Annuals, plus a few that have been lurking in pots from earlier propagation efforts.

and I fertilized a lot of miniature roses, and I encouraged L. to break up the last of the dead couch so I can slip the pieces into the trash and stop annoying the neighbors, and I bought 4 zebra danios and two crystal shrimp (the standard red and white kind, not the other colors which apparently can fetch up to $3,000 in auctions.....life is unjust and unfair and horribly awry when ittty bitty colored shrimp that will only live a year or two in your fish tank sell for enough to keep a family alive with food for many months)....anyway, the red and white kind are just as cute and infinitely cheaper.

and I fed the cats and sifted the cat boxes and did maybe 3 loads of dishes and made some french toast and took L. to Tres Hermanas for lunch, and dropped people off and picked people up and went shopping at Trader Joes and then ran up to the corner store for the onions we forgot so now we can have pizza......

pant, pant, and it's 8:40 and the bedroom is just as messy as ever....

but at least I think I know now what I want to do with all these papers....in theory.....

GIMP: Warped Borders and Brushes

Last post before I fulfill my pledge to stay off the computer at home until the bedroom is reorganized.  All brilliant GIMP ideas to be noted down in my Studio Journal!  Once I find it!!

My previous GIMP explorations led me to wonder how a basic line would look if it was twisted clockwise or counter clockwise using I-Warp.  After a while, this is what my basic first image looked like, only it was always on a clear background.  A line towards the left, a line towards the right, and some stamped shapes in the middle.  As mentioned in my previous post, you can decide with the pen and pencil tools how soon you want the shape to repeat when you draw lines.  This is maybe 20%; default is 10% but then you only pick up the very edges of the pattern and the line looks like coils.

Here is one side, warped counter-clockwise.  You have to be careful with the diameter of the warp, so you only affect the more immediate area.

I almost always flip the other side to match the first:

And the shapes in the middle, linked to the swirly shapes through their color and markings, I spin to varying degrees.  You have to be careful with these, as your spin will start to pick up the nearest line.  See smallest central motif plus middle left swirly line: the line is starting to accompany the motif on its rounds!

I made a series of sets of swirly shapes, based on stamps like the ones be that I already have.

This was originally a Bargello-like oval to begin with.  Here I alternated clockwise and counter clockwise warping on the same strand.  I was going to line these up on one line to save space, but Blogger no like!

matching swirly side.  The center motifs have been converted into future GIMP brush stamps.

I used a rangoli design and ended up with something that looks like Celtic knots.

I forget what the original stamp was, but it came out as flowing silver shapes.

A geode shape:

One of my swirly bubbles from a month or more ago.  This makes great smoke.

I love this one.  The line is made with a greenish-yellow square, left only 10% apart so the lines look like springs.  I left a lot of line undisturbed to emphasize the spring effect.

The following have not been completed....that is, I made the designs, but haven't copied the portions.  Each strand also becomes a stamp (I had to make sure they weren't too big, if they had been, part of the stamp might have been cut off.  These were either 400 or 500 px. long, each side).

Here's blue tiger stripes

Red and yellow flames from a sun-like original stamp

This was from an open shaded stamp.  I should show some of the un-warped stamps for context.  In the middle below I stamped two right next to each other, made the amount of distortion very small and warped them in two different directions..

 These are bugs.  With a bit of work and a bit more drawing ability one could make a curving line of ants.  Note that the bugs below are at two different distances, one at around 100%, the other at maybe 75%.

these are warped leaves.

A warped yellow flower stamp:

Warped white lace stamps also make excellent smoke:

Yellow mosaic based suns.  Kind of like palm trees.

Thin rayed sun stamps

And here are what some of these new stamps look like in action.  As long as my original stamp had some clear portions in it, I get intricate filigree patterns that are especially obvious when I use the stamp to erase down to a lower, brighter layer.

Here is the liquid silver stamp

Here is a double diagonal blue stamp.

This one is based on a circle that was warped.  I need to make more of these!

Playing around with warped lines; I think the red background was from stamping a large red sun motif 4 times and warping them in different ways.

Some rather indistinct swirly images.  This is a feature if not a drawback, that when you warp shapes they become blurry.  You can re-emphasize them by adding cartoon, which will give strong black lines.

Rows of blue smoke, alternating with rows of blue smoke used as an eraser to a white background.

Springs in action, over pale seaweed background.  These are colors I would often think of as ugly, but I love them together.

More springs, with some of the long strands dragged across the image with the pen, giving striations that vary in size as the pen swings left or right.

Some large, clunky swirls.  This reminds me of woodcut designs.

one last:

Apologies to my friend the spambot, my descriptions are not very coherent.  Many of the designs above are giving me ideas for more spin off projects, but I need to start a massive amount of cleaning for the next few days, and will do my best to stay off all media until I am done.....  Sometimes when I spend too much time on the computer a form of dread and anxiety seems to build up.  Not enough time spent in my own head, perhaps.

While choosing the label for this post I looked at all the other labels I have used in the past and it reminds me that nowadays all of my posts have to do with GIMP.  I'm doing very little else in the way of crafts.  Partly I blame the garden, and that's not a bad thing, but also the mess in my room is getting in the way of doing things.....

GIMP: Mola Inspired (Very Loosely)

I called the images I created here "molas" but they aren't really, I would want to bend the lines in a different manner to make them seem like molas.  That's a topic for a future post.

Here is a gradient background with I-Warp applied to make it swirly.

The lines this time are caused by using the pencil tool as an eraser down to the gradient background thorough a solid black top layer.  Some lines are much thinner....already the lines give the illusion of being warped because it's the black we see as lines rather than the multi-colored.

Here they are after being warped.  They were either grown or shrunk.  The nice thing about I-Warp is you can repair your mistakes by choosing "remove" and as you pass the mouse over the image below un-warps like a backwards movie.

Here is the next layer of straight lines, black this time rather than erasures, I believe.

This is what these new lines look like, alone, after they have been warped.

And here they are together.

This time I selected only one layer at a time, all of the black, and shrunk my selection.  After I shrunk it, I then made a 3 px border and used the eraser over the still selected border to show more of the gradient background.

I kept selecting and reselecting black lines, each time the image looked more and more like open frayed cloth.

Here is the final version, with some of the threads looking very sketchy at this point.

I created a map object sphere out of the background and

made a very long image, using the balls as spacers.  I selected the white background between the balls at the end and added a gradient made up of darker versions of the background colors.  Again, look at this in gallery view because this is pretty tiny here.  :-)

Ok, must go clean things.  I'm glad I'm taking the time to write this stuff down, because I think I would have forgotten that the first lines were actually eraser lines.

hmmmmmmm, my brain is tired!