An Early Spring

cherry blossom photo by Heather Powazek Champ

It's been in the air. Maybe you've felt it too. A fresh start burgeoning, getting things squared away, ready to rev up once again.

One thing led to another, I found myself Organizing and Cleaning both my studio and computer over the last two days. The morning Sven was here my stalwart computer hesitated to boot up, giving me pause. When it cut out on its own after that, I thought it important to take some time and sort and print an save the hundreds of screen grabs for Halfland reference and art inspiration I had taken from surfing safaris over the last several months. I happened, finally, upon a streamlined method of creating a "contact sheet" from an entire folder that can be printed out, as long as smallish will do. It's in Photoshop's Browse sub-program, under the automate pull down called "Contact Sheet II". It allows you to choose a folder and select how many rows and columns you'd like, the rest is automated and takes a fraction of the time I used to take doing the same thing by hand. [end of tip]Sample contact sheet of a miniature house technique as taught by Rik Pierce. These photos are very very helpful for showing me how I can build my cottage. I've still got many folders yet to compose and print and backup.

Today's Halfland act was to move the huge cottage set out into the hallway a bit in order to make room for building the landscape around it. The other day I stopped at gallery cluster, Bergamot Station for the scrap wood to build the set extensions. They had more clean flat plywood art crates than I could carry away without a truck. (Pay attention LA people, if you can use tons of free wood for your sets, the wood bin is at the far right of the parking lot as you drive in.) Downstairs Clare let me raid his scrap wood for what I hadn't find there. I collected all the lumber into a mini yard ready to build and generally spruced up the whole workshop to make it roomier to actually work in.

I cleared off half of my computer desk to make it a convenient animation exercise area. I hooked up Strider's web cam and all the odd lamps I had lying around. When I tried to make a test clip, Framethief crashed on every capture attempt (?). I'll have to tend to that mogumbow ASAP.

What I used for the first test was a little paper mask that I made during an impromptu workshop on textures and improvisational puppet construction Sven and I did the other day. We tore a manila envelope in to a mask shape, formed it over crumpled pieces of paper, held down with tape. The shaped paper was painted with a mixture of plaster and iron base paint which gave it great texture and structure when dry. So far I've added a coat of black matte gesso and plan to add several acrylic rust tones to make it look like old iron. I like the way the holes on the peg board look like pupils behind the eye opening.
Hello Dali?
The mask shot through poured glass bottles and a magnifying glass. edited in Photoshop