Travel theme: Colour

Where’s my backpack has colour as the uplifting travel theme this week. I typically don’t wear a lot of colour but I love to see it and my artwork is often quite colourful. In order to fulfill this week’s challenge I trawled through my photos from holidays in Scotland 2016 and Europe 2015, that was fun.

Unison handmade pastels

A splash of colour, Victoria Street Edinburgh

Barrels of colour pigment at the Unison pastel factory

Tulips in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh

Flowering gorse, Gardenstown

Gardenstown sunset

David comes in many colours in Florence

Flares create colourful smoke at a protest in Paris

Colourful entree of empanadas at an Argentinian restaurant in Berlin

Venetian window display

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Wordless Wednesday: Summer Colour

Flowers blooming during the heat of summer and providing some much needed colour to our natural environment.

Using Lightroom for processing my photos

Photoshop came into my life in the early nineties, at the time I was in my last year of a degree in graphic design and had just bought an Apple LCIII with an 80MB hard drive. Since graduating there has been numerous upgrades to the software and my computers and I moved from using Photoshop for processing photographs to Lightroom. Lightroom doesn’t have the millions of features that Photoshop has but it is sufficient for most things I want to do and the interface is easier to use, and it has the added bonus of being alot cheaper.

There are heaps of tips and video tutorials available for users of Lightroom, and a few days ago I came across a short YouTube clip demonstrating how to add a bit of oomph to my images. The technique is quite simple, boost saturation of the Blue Primary in your Camera Calibration menu.  Below is the video tutorial by Trevor Dayley:

Although it may not be suitable for all images, you can choose the level of saturation and it does work quite well with my landscape photographs. Below are a couple of before and after pictures so you can see the difference. I’d love to know what you think, does it work for you? Which image do you prefer?

The Hubby ‘before’ pic with only minor adjustments made and no adjusting of the blue primary.

The Hubby ‘after’ pic with only minor adjustments made and 100% saturation with blue primary.

The Vernazza ‘before’ pic with only minor adjustments made and no adjusting of the blue primary.

The Vernazza ‘after’ pic with only minor adjustments made and 100% saturation of the blue primary.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Color

My fondness for photographing flowers is evident in this gallery, pretty blooms in many shades of pink from the palest of pinks through to the bright, vibrant pinks, they really stand out against the green foliage which is no surprise considering red and green are complementary colours and bring out the best in each other.

Learning to play with pastels

This year I’ve been attending regular art classes to improve my technique in using pastels, my illustrations have always been quite detailed in the past, I’m a realist at heart and lean towards being a bit of a perfectionist or so my mother and a million personality profile tests tell me 🙂

It is hard to tell whether I have improved in terms of my illustrations but learning how to loosen up and find a technique that suits me has been a valuable experience. Both the angel illustration and the river rocks image are earlier illustrations, done prior to my art teacher sending me off to classes with a local artist specialising in pastels. I have chosen to focus on landscapes for the moment, they allow me to practice my technique without getting caught up in the detail, plus the colours can be fabulous to play with especially in the clouds.

Cheers and have a lovely weekend!

Illustration of an angel, original image was from a photographic series of angels

I had 30 minutes to get this done, a great exercise in learning to loosen up. The original image was a photograph of somewhere in Scotland.

A peaceful and serene image of the most famous volcano in Italy, Mt Vesuvius.

Trying to capture a storm coming over the hills of my family’s farm in New Zealand

An earlier pastel drawing of an area that looks similar to the creeks and waterholes that we used to swim in as kids.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Geometry

 

I fell in love with the traditional handblown glass lamps feature heavily in Venice, but this lamp also appealed and I loved that it would have been easier to pack and transport than the glass lamps. The coloured light and happy shape brightened our last dinner in Venice, for we did not want to leave.