By George, I think she's got it!

I have actually reached my stated goal of having these two pieces finished by today!  Unfortunately, the weather would not cooperate, so the photos aren't the greatest, but here they are.

Transformation 41

Ingredients: monotype prints using oil-based litho inks on Rives BFK paper, Caran D'Ache crayons, watercolor pencils, acrylic gel medium, PVA glue

I think of this one as the seed entering the earth, hopefully completing a trilogy with the other two pieces the client bought.  When I posted this piece before, a couple of people felt it could use more "rootiness" (thanks for the word, Don), and I agreed that it needed something on the bottom to balance it out.  I tried about 47 million different things, and this seemed to work best.  Okay, I could be exaggerating a bit, but it felt like 47 million.  I'm not sure I'm completely satisfied with it, but this how it will remain unless/until I think of something better.

 Butterfly Buddha Child

Ingredients:  FW acrylic ink, maps, book pages, chiri paper, watercolor pencil, Caran D'Ache crayons, ginko leaves, metallic oil crayon, metallic paint pen, Rives BFK paper, on Multimedia Art Board

 Butterfly Buddha Child- detail

Butterfly Buddha Child- detail

Sorry about the wonky photos, but I hope you enjoy these nonetheless!

Fly Away

Today I want to fly away,
(no thinking)
to rise,
(no planning)
to ride on a cool breeze;
(no worrying)

no thinking.
no planning.
no worrying.

Drop a bundle of regrets
into the deepest sea.

forget all boundaries.
just be.

today
I want to fly away.

Butterfly Girl (Little Mona Lisa)

This was another Photoshop exercise. I took this photo at a recent butterfly show at the Krohn conservatory. Unfortunately, it was a very dark and rainy day, so it turned out pretty grainy. But I liked the image because the girl had such a mysterious expression- an inscrutable smile, you could say. She reminded me of a young version of the Mona Lisa, so I wanted to see if I could fix the photo. I thought it would be cool, since it was grainy, to make it appear to be an old sepia print, with the butterfly in color to make it stand out more. I ended up calling my son, who guided me through the process of making a mask, etc., to accomplish this, which we finally did. Another problem was that the girl's face was at the edge of the frame, so there was a lot of unwanted space behind her. We were able to kind of blur this out and make it darker, but the yucky composition still bugged me, so I cropped it. My son said it was not "professional" to crop the frame, and that it was still too grainy. I had hoped to enter it in a photo contest, but because the quality isn't what it should be, I guess I'll just chalk it up to a learning experience. I still like it this way, though.