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Creative Photography for iPhone Users

By Alix on September 8, 2010

An iPhone photo of agapantha flowers with creative processing applied

Moody, dreamy — I like how Plastic Bullet sees the world!

Ever since first get­ting an iPhone a cou­ple of years ago, I have had a rocky rela­tion­ship with the built-in cam­era. The pho­tos I took were just hor­ri­ble: blurry, unin­spired messes that irri­tated me. For the most part, I ignored it, despite a few exper­i­ments with pho­tog­ra­phy apps and the com­pul­sive kitty pic­tures. My feel­ing was that I’d rather lug around my Nikon dSLR — fairly out­dated at five years old — than try to do any­thing mean­ing­ful with my iPhone camera.

But recently, I’ve been want­ing to change my atti­tude. I now have an iPhone 4, which has a bet­ter cam­era and, in decent light­ing con­di­tions, it doesn’t embar­rass me as much as it used to. More impor­tantly, I’m want­ing to include more pho­tog­ra­phy in my art work, and I have to be hon­est: I’m not going to carry my Nikon every­where I go. I need some­thing small and fun. I’m also ready to let go of the snob­bery I carry from my pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher days, when toy cam­eras seemed like a way to cover up bad photo skills. Let’s be real — I’m not try­ing to doc­u­ment real­ity. I want to be creative.

Toward that end, I signed up for LK Ludwig’s iphone pho­tog­ra­phy class, The Camera in Your Pocket. Because I signed up on a hol­i­day week­end, I was aware that I wouldn’t get the class infor­ma­tion for sev­eral days. But know­ing that doesn’t stop my brain from churn­ing, so I spent a cou­ple of days on a mad ques­tion to find out every­thing I could about the lat­est and great­est iPhone pho­tog­ra­phy apps. 72 hours later, I have a lot to share! Continue read­ing “Creative Photography for iPhone Users”

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Posted in Practical Matters, Resources for Artists, Uncategorized | Tagged iphone, photography, photos, tools | Leave a response

Procrastination Buster: The Scrap O’ Crap Technique

By Alix on August 13, 2010

Ever see an art or craft tech­nique demon­strated and think, “Wow, I should try that out!”? It looks super cool and just watch­ing, your mind is alight with all the things you could do with it. Maybe you already have every­thing you need, which makes it excit­ing – some­thing new to do with your stash!

Or maybe you don’t have every­thing you need, which might be even more excit­ing – new things to shop for! You go as far as to buy all the sup­plies (even if it requires some shop­ping around) and you gather them together in an attrac­tive pile, ready for your next art adventure.

Only, time passes and your sup­plies begin to gather dust. With each pass­ing day, the like­li­hood of you actu­ally try­ing out that cool “I-gotta-try-that” tech­nique dimin­ishes. Down the road, when you see some­thing made using the same tech­nique, you think, “Oh, right, I meant to try that.” But your fire to exper­i­ment with it has died down and it joins the long list of, “things I meant to do some­time.” Secretly, you start to build up resis­tance, resis­tance that might find its base in the anx­i­ety of, “but what if I suck at it?” Continue read­ing “Procrastination Buster: The Scrap O’ Crap Technique”

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Posted in Block Busters, Creativity | Tagged challenge, creative blocks, inner critic, procrastination, technique | Leave a response

Watercolor Essentials by Birgit O’Connor

By Alix on August 13, 2010

Watercolor Essentials: Hands-on Techniques for Exploring Watercolor in Motion
by Birgit O’Connor
2009, North Light Books


Something about a lusciously-photographed tech­nique book–the sort filled with lovely close-ups of brushes drag­ging through vibrant paint–makes me inhale a slow, deep breath and release it into a lan­guorous sigh. It doesn’t mat­ter that I have more than enough tech­nique books; make it pretty enough and there’s a chance I might buy it.

That’s actu­ally what made me hes­i­tate when I picked up Birgit O’Connor’s lat­est; the con­cern that I’m a bit too knee-jerk and this might just be more clut­ter for my over­bur­dened book­case. But once I saw that a 70-minute instruc­tional DVD was included in the $29.99 (USD) cover price, I was sold. Besides, I knew Birgit had a great rep­u­ta­tion in the field of water­color, so how could I go wrong? Continue read­ing “Watercolor Essentials by Birgit O’Connor”

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Posted in Reviews | Tagged book reviews, instructions, painting, technique, watercolor | Leave a response

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