 Evan and I were stunned at the variety and excellent quality of the work  The musicians and refreshments were outstanding!  Everyone seemed to enjoy the exciting atmosphere  Evan and I had an awesome time at the St. Catherine's Patron of the Arts 19th Annual Photography, Art & Poetry Exhibition this past weekend! The multi-faceted and multi-dimensional show featured over 700 pieces of art of all kinds (and all ages), including oil and acrylic paintings, watercolors, pastels, mixed media, sculpture, as well as photography, poetry, live musical performances, and fantastic refreshments. It was one of the most enjoyable and best-quality shows I've ever had the pleasure to be a part of. To make it more fun, the show offered 1st, 2nd, 3rd place and Judges Choice Awards in various categories. The prospectus said winners would be notified by email the Friday before the show. I was hoping to hear something, but the Friday came and went and I assumed the awards went to other people. Evan and I were both disappointed, but we went to the show excited and expecting to have a good time. As we made our way among all the stunning artwork and poems, we discovered that I had won three awards! There wasn't enough time to notify the winners this year, and the surprise left me stunned and floating on a cloud! I won: Judges Choice Award - Art, Transformation First Place Art Award - Mixed Media, Aslan Spirituality Award - Poetry, Your Love Heals Me
Thank you so much to all the judges!! I'm very grateful to Maude Carolan Psych, a fellow member of the North Jersey Christian Writers Group for telling me about the show.  Evan's a big part of my success-- his encouragement, support and feedback are invaluable!
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 Personal Commission: House Portrait - Garden City, New York
8 x 10 digital Here's a house portrait I recently completed for a client. Hope she likes it! Tools used: Photoshop, watercolors, watercolor pencils, graphite pencil on watercolor paper  Original photograph  Completed watercolor  For fun, I converted the finished piece to black & white in Photoshop -- Cool!  Fun with Photomatix -- Tree outside our front door  Playing around with Photomatix Pro - Enhanced version of photo below  Along the road to the Paulinskill Trail -- July 2012  My Uncle Rog asked me to do a picture of his house -- two years ago! I had never done something like this and kept putting it off. I recently completed it and delivered it to him while visiting in Michigan. Below is one of the original reference photos. I scanned photos into Photoshop, did some editing and converted the photo to a sketchy outlines, then printed it on watercolor paper. I used watercolor, watercolor pencil, gouache, pen and acrylic paint to complete the project. He and Aunt Bert LOVED it! This was music to my ears -- Hallelujah!!  Original photo I created this illustration for a contest held at the Catherine Dickson Hoffman Branch of the Warren County Library. I chose to illustrate the Mother Goose Rhyme; " Daffy-down-dilly has come to town in a yellow petticoat and a green gown." Below are the steps of my process: 1. initial sketch scanned into Photoshop 2. tweaked and colored in Illustrator 3. Then adjustments in Photoshop again.  Initial sketch  I traced the sketch with a pen, then scanned it in and tweaked it in Photoshop, then opened it in Illustrator.  I initially colored it in Illustrator using the Live Trace and Live Paint tools...  We thought it was missing something... a "petticoat"! I forgot to add her petals....! Same process again... initially sketched the petals, scanned them in and placed on a new layer in Photoshop.  Decided to make the black squigglies colored and added a ladybug in Photoshop....  A few more color tweaks and added details in Photoshop, and this is the finished product! In a recent Book Illustration Class I'm taking a discussion came up about using images found online and copyright laws. The conclusion was the best bet is to use your own material / photographs if possible. Thus, I had the idea to try to work directly from one of my photographs. In an attempt to save time at re-drawing the images, I found this tutorial online to convert my photos to line art in Photoshop. Here's the link... Tutorial. Then I printed them on watercolor paper and painted in color with watercolor washes and watercolor pencils. It was a FUN exercise with pretty cool results at a fraction of the time! I tweaked the tutorial instructions slightly: 1. I made sure the image size was 300 dpi and the dimensions I wanted. 2. Edit out any background items you don't want in your watercolor 'drawing'. 2. Under Filter > Smart Blur, I made the settings: Radius- 15, Threshold- 30, Quality- High, and Mode- Edge Only 3. I then selected: Image>Adjustments>Invert If you try this, please let me know how it turned out for you!
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