I Kain't Quit YOU!

So this was the plan. Stay out of ArtWalk for the Summer and concentrate on my work, my two jobs and my home life......yeah, it didn't actually work that way. But I can explain!


OK, so the first ArtWalk I was going to miss was the July 1st show. I had a meeting with a man we'll call Scary Guy, I was looking for yet a third job. I know, a third job....stupid, I'm stretched thin as it is and I'm looking for a third job? Oy.... anywho, the Scary Guy gave me bad vibes so I chose, after much deliberation, not to do business with him. I deliberated because I wanted to earn the extra money sooooo badly but in the end I figured he would be the kind of guy that could dismember a body and not think twice about it.


I was at Agua Java with Scary Guy and then after our meeting I went to Vernon's, where Scary Guy actually ended up as well...a little weird. I asked him how knew about V's and he said a friend of his went there. And then I said, "Well I'm fairly regular here, who's your friend, maybe I know of him." He said oh it's not my friend its a friend of a friend. My sister thinks he followed me there.


Well there I am at V's and so I have a beer and leave and I think, "Well I'm close to House of Rock, I should go and stop by and see how the kids are doing." Yeah, "stop by"....famous last words.


So I get there and Michaela and Rene are there and so I get to gabbing with them and next thing you know I'm brokering a deal between a buyer and Michaela. So she finally sold a piece at a show. She's really an excellent artist. She's a Brit, you know and crazy talented. Next thing I know its 10:30 and I'm finally going home after "stopping by".


So I couldn't do it. I couldn't stay away from ArtWalk. Although I did like not having to hang anything or take anything down. Yes, I'm lazy. So I worked up this poster (you'll see them in the downtown area starting the end of this week at the House of Rock).

I want to talk a little bit about digital art. I'm in no way a pro at digital art, as a matter of fact, I'm jsut learning my way around digi-land. But I want to share with you the steps I made and you can share ideas or whatever.

So this is the photo I started with:

Zelda

Now what I did was get rid of the background. Oh wait, where are my manners? This is Zelda, my youngest nephew's dog. I did the digital piece from this photo my sister took. I have a piece I did of the final digital on Fine Art America titled Hermana Muy Curiosa.

So I got rid of the background by just erasing and filling in large areas with white using the bucket tool. I kept the shadow and the whiskers and of course Zelda. Then I selected color as I went along and dumped color using the bucket tool on different parts of Zelda. So wherever the color would stick is where I left it. Here is the piece after I finished using the bucket tool.

Now you can see where the colors stuck and you can see the "dirt". Now when I was working on this piece, and I've learned to do this with all my digi pieces, I work on it in a bmp file and then the I put the finished product into a PNG. It just comes out better than a JPG. I don't know all the technical aspects of it but yeah, I can see the difference.


The "dirt" you see in the colors are just little areas that didn't pick up the color. So you can go back and do what I did which was take the paint brush tool and flip back and forth between different sizes of the brush to get rid of the dirt. After the piece was clean (I zoomed in and out of the piece to make sure I got every color mass nice and clean) I uploaded it to Fine Art America.

Hermana Muy Curiosa
http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/laurette-escobar.html

I took this image and placed all the text necessary for the poster and sent it off to Vista Print where I got 20 11 x 16" posters for $50. All digital work was done in Pixlr (http://pixlr.com/editor/), which I highly recommend for the beginner. The help tutorials are excellent and its free, so that way you're not paying a lot of money for something you're not sure you're going to use regularly. But once you get started, you'll find its hard to stop.

Back to the first topic, ArtWalk. Y'all need to come on down. Hit downtown the first weekend of every month and you will not be disappointed. On Friday nights there is art for every taste all throughout downtown and at the marina on Saturday there's a great Market Place with everything from produce to crafty things. Then Sunday you can walk across the bridge.

Join me at House of Rock on August 5th. House is on 511 Starr St. at the corner of Mesquite and Starr (a block down from KSpace). We'll start the party at 5:30 and continue on through the night with musical guests, Bar Nuts!