Finding Similarities & Loving Differences

As much as l love the month of February, when it ends I am certain that it has only just BEgun.

There are things I customarily DO on the last day of each month, and then there are things I intend to complete each week and each day within that week.

Of course, this is ordinary Life.

And my Life?!

It is less ordinary than others’ lives, those who have work to go to and children to raise and family commitments to meet and and and…

Still…

Keeping myself different, dissimilar, outside of, and apart from people or “normal” Life is a recipe for a tiny adventure into the Land of Disaster & Chaos.

I am NOT those things at all. I am just ME living My Life Now.

I’ve been working on some Pretty Big Deal For Me Stuff this week. This month, really. So in a sense it is nice to reach the 28^th of February with a sense of completion.

In this Spirit of feeling good and happy, I am taking a page from the books of others I so admire and combining Artist’s Play Room #46 and Photo Art Friday 1 March 2013 into this one post.

The themes, inspirations, or if you like, challenges of both could NOT BE more different… Yet, for me, they are nearly one and the same.

You see, APR and PAF act as two sturdy bookends in my weeks. 

They provide me with opportunities to learn and try and fail and laugh and make discoveries and wanttotearmyhairout [sometimes] and try again and see WhatHappensIf?! and, well, they just give me a container [or, really, a door to walk through, out, and BEyond] in which to live my Life one little breath at a time.

Though their theme, prompt, or challenge this week are BLORANGE [for Blue & Orange] and Vintage, despite the differences, they’ve intersected in some pretty darn cool ways.

At least for me.

Paradise is an entirely digital collage. 

Of course, it started out as all my collages DO with some sweet time of sifting papers and finding the ones that sang to me. 

I then spent several deLIGHTfull and engaging hours scanning and composing on my scanner AND another one "painting" without gluing the paper to my substrate.

I spent a good long while digital fiddling in both Picasa and Pixlr Express, liking some of my results and BEing surprised by others. I had many moments of WOW!!! I DIDN’T KNOW THAT WORKED LIKE THAT!!??!!

What started as my intention to make an entirely digital painting, [or two, one blue and the other orange, mostly] unfolded with surprises and deLIGHTs too numerous to list.

I did also make two collages with some of those papers I’d sifted. And I did that first by photographing them and second by gluing them down and scanning them. It was/is quite an enJOYable process.

BElow are the photographed versions, Blue and Orange:

And BElow Here you can see the glued-down and scanned versions of Blue and Orange:

And so here’s the thing about Photo Art Friday… after I’d scanned and photographed and fiddled and played with these blues and oranges and whatever all spoke to me, I had a “something I THOUGHT would BE my singular BLORANGE offering” which turned out NOT to work as I’d thought it would, so I decided to further fiddle with it as something a little more like Vintage…

Take 1, a variation on the theme of BLORANGE…

Which is totally almost ALL ORANGE and no real BL[ue]…

Turned to VINTAGE with a little help from Pixlr Editor and then Pixlr Express. I’m sharing both versions as I simply got too cross-eyed to pick just one. 

Amazing thing is, Pixlr Editor works exactly like what I was hoping Photoshop Elements 8 would DO, meaning it is intuitive and less affected by my bumbling and stumbling…

So there is my Journey, gently guided and encouraged by Artist’s Play Room and Photo Art Friday.

It’s been quite a day this week… such a lovely thing, er, two lovely things to keep me grounded when I start to “lift-off” and get lost in the clouds…