ColourLovers.com

My cousin recommended a site to me called Colour Lovers. It is so amazing. It is basically a social networking site, but with a twist. You get to make art on it. It is all about color, color palettes and making patterns with those palettes. It is really addicting, so you are warned!

This is my favorite palette I have made to date. Just something about it.
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It was made with one of CL's "advanced" palette making tools. It pulls photos from places like flickr and user added photos from the web as well, and lets you grab colors off of them. It is called PHOTOCOPA, it's sister tool is COPASO pro Palette Tool, where you can use photos off of your computer that it will pixillate for you.
This is a palette I made in COPASO. p


Here are a couple that I made using my own photos. This was called Weathered Monument and this is the photo that inspired it. It was a wonderful monument in the parking lot at a Lighthouse my Aunt took me to see in Oregon.
I love the colors in it. Really great.


This I called Bricks, and was inspired by the wonderfully vibrant bricks and art, at the Fort Worth train station. I love the pink stripe. Fun thing about using
the "advanced" palette tools at CL is that you can play with the widths of the colors you are using. A palette looks very different when the weight of the colors is all equal. Here is Bricks with equal widths. Not the same effect at all. In fact it looks really wrong like that. It throws the balance off to allow all of the colors to have equal weight.

Here is one made with out using widths effects, that was designed that way using CL's regular palette making tool. It is called Olives in a Dish. All of the colors, are colors I made, that are named after different kinds of olives. It works well with equal widths.

Anyway, check out colourlovers.com . It really is fun, and addictive. Next time I will post some of my patterns that I have made and a few of my favorite colors.

Oregon and Washington Trip Pictures

I went to Oregon to visit my Aunts for a week and then to Washington to visit my best friend and her family for 2 weeks. It was wonderful!

It took me for EVER to get the pictures uploaded, but I think I got some really great shots.

A lot of art inspiration! These rocks just tickled me. They were gorgeous!


You know it' s cold when the rocks are frosty. I think these were taken on the way up to Mt. St. Helens. My best friend is so wonderful about stopping every where so I can take pictures and collect...things...


And here is the lovely lady herself! It was amazing up there. We could not get all that close, the roads were closed at Clear Lake. But we had lots of fun trying.












This is Clear Lake. It was GORGEOUS, even under all the snow. I will be curious to see what it looks like in the summer. There must be lovely trails. We had to forge our own, and were up to our hips in some areas in very wet, cold, snow.We thought we were going to have a picnic here, not really all that practical, the picnic benches would have had to be excavated.
The "No Swimming" sign, even though I knew it was for summer, seriously cracked me up. That sign is posted on the dock... looking over the water... brrrrr

Dallas Arboretum Photos

A friend and I went to the Dallas Arboretum for her Birthday, and just had a ball. I had never been, and it is so beautiful. I took lots of pictures.

I like the flower pictures, one for their beauty, and two because they give me ideas for jewelry. I am a bead artist, you can see some of my work at TCDesignsStudio.blogspot.com.

I love getting cool pictures of
sculpture. I like to see if I can capture it in a way that was maybe not intended. Some large scale sculpture has such

great lines, and nooks-and-cranny's, for lack of better words (sorry about that!). Also, if they are outdoors, they can get the most amazing texture.



I also really love any photos of just plain texture that I can get. You can do so much with a photo like that. They are great for
backgrounds for artwork, they are great torn up and used in your journals, and some of them can stand alone, and just be framed.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

I posted this in an attempt to get it entered in a photo contest for Wired Magazine. The contest was titled "Squares". I could not get the photo to show up on the voting page, so no luck!

The Kimbell

Here are more pictures from the same trip to the Kimbell Art Museum. I love this statue in the open air eating area. She is so relaxing to look at. Great food there too, although it can not compare to the food at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. I had one of the best meals of my life there!



This is a picture of the open air eating area, that has a tree growing in the middle. It is so pretty. Not so good when it is raining, but lovely otherwise.



When we went to the museums, we took the train from town, to Fort Worth, then a city bus to the museums. At the Train station there are these amazing sort of bas-reliefs, on the wall outside. They are just gorgeous, and full of wonderful history!

Zipper Mural

This has to be one of my favorite murals of all time. Although, to be honest, I really like most murals I see.

This is in Fort Worth, somewhere... It was taken from the bus window on the way to the Kimbell Art Museum.

I can not tell you where exactly, I do not know the area well enough.

I just love it! I want to reach out and unzip more of it. I think the artist did such a great job, it is so real, and it leaves you wanting more, but does not leave you frustrated.

I wish it was possible to get a picture of it minus all of the cars and the fence. Problem is, the cars are parked right up against the side of the building, so no go.

Power Outage Woes

Boy do you miss electricity when you do not have it! The long absence of new posts was due to lack of power. We had a big storm that felled a very big tree that took three utility polls with it. We had no power for two days, and it was hot!

The poor kitties do not enjoy power outages. I am not sure why they find it so upsetting, but it discombobulates them all. One day I had all of them piled on my bed at once. That is a large kitty pile! And I have got to say, it did not make the heat factor any easier to bear!

We are back in business now, and I am really enjoying electricity, with conservation in mind, of course.

Same Day Different Journal

All right, so this is a little redundant, but the two journal spreads turned out so different, and I like them both. I had done this spread in my latest journal, no title yet, and liked how it turned out, so I thought I would share with my Dad, and did a spread in his (see post from 6/2/08).

I used both pictures I took with a digital camera and then printed on matte photo paper, matte is my favorite kind, and pictures I took with my IZone camera. I love that little camera, and it is getting harder and harder to find film for it. It is a tiny Polaroid camera, that often comes with sticky on the back of the picture for ease of journal use.

You will notice that there is a large stain over the pages. That would be because I spilled an entire cup of coffee into my backpack in which my journal was packed. You will see that most of the pages look like that. Oh well, no use crying over spilt... coffee?

Photoshop Elements Fun

I have been playing with Photoshop Elements. I loved this photo. It was taken at a beach where there is no collecting allowed.

My little friend and I really liked these rocks, and wanted some way of taking them with us. Unfortunately the photo turned out blurry. For some reason, I think maybe the strong light at the beach, I was not able to see how blurry it was till I got it home. I was not willing to loose the photo, so I played with it in Elements.

I think the effect that made the piece, was making it shiny. I think it hides the fact that it is blurry. I would like to spend some more time playing in Elements. I am not able to manipulate it when I want to, I tend to just play around, and if something works, then great! But the times when I needed something done right now such as cropping, I am lost.

Little Edward

Edward T. Bear is the ruler of our house. He rules with a kind, but very firm paw.

We got him when he was 3 weeks old.

The day he was let out of confinement (for health and safety) he weighed less than a pound, and he chased our then alpha male cat who outweighed him by 12 or 13 pounds, across the house.

Every time he went to the vets for his well kitten visits, she would tell us, "Don't worry, the other cats will start disciplining him, he will not be so obnoxious for very long." We are still waiting for that to happen, eight years later.

We managed to cure him of some behaviors such as biting the bridge of your nose to get you to do what he wants, but most of it is beyond our control.

Even my friends will say, "He is so Edward".

My Desk

This is my incredibly "artistic" desk. Kind of messy, even when I can get to it.

There is a pile of my journals on the right, including my beading journal (the gold one), which I have not been able to lay my hands on for close to 6 months.

Wish I could find it!