I’ve been absent from this website for the past couple of weeks, but I can assure you that my head wasn’t completely buried in the sand.
I just took a stroll through it with my bare feet….

I’ve been active elsewhere on the web; shopping for fixtures, studying booth designs, and stocking up on Epson Cold Press paper from my favorite online dealer….

I also placed a large order for new business cards yesterday. I still have a couple hundred (cheap!) business cards from VistaPrint that I’m no longer crazy about ~ is there anything I can DO with them?!

These new business cards are designed to be collectible; each card features one of my cat characters from Pride and Prejudice with an accompanying quote:

I’m getting these cards printed from Moo.com…. Dominic finds the name “Moo” embarrassing, by the way, and suggests they change it to “Meow”. If the cards turn out as well as I hope, more designs will be forthcoming. They would also make cute postcards, don’t you think?

The reason for all this preparation and stockpiling is that I’ve been accepted as a vendor for the Carroll County Farmer’s Market in Westminster, Maryland (specific dates to be announced)… AND… I’ll also be selling my artwork at the Urbana Music Festival in Frederick, Maryland on Saturday, June 23rd. My table will be located inside the Urbana Regional Library, and 15% of my sales will be donated to Friends of the Library.

Two years ago, I resolved to get my artwork into an actual art fair… and each season, I stand in my studio holding printed applications. Occasionally I’ve even managed to fill them out. This year, I’ve shaken the sand out of my hair and walked directly to the post office, depositing the stamped applications into the Out of Town slot.

No turning back.

Last week I sent off one such application for an Independent Press booth at MegaCon 2013, held each spring in Orlando, Florida. Many of the successful artists that I follow are regulars attendees at MegaCon ~ as well as other major fantasy conventions like DragonCon in Atlanta, GA, and FaerieCon in Baltimore, MD.

MegaCon is a sci-fi/fantasy/anime geek paradise… where people dress-up as their favorite comic book or fantasy characters, compete in costume contests, and receive autographs from television actors. Last year, Brent Spiner (Lt. Data) was there! *swoon*

Attending a show like this could very well be the kick-start I need to get my anthropomorphic cats in front of thousands of appreciative eyes.

A Flickr Slideshow of MegaCon attendees… I love the DeLorean costume! LOL! ♥

The logistics of participating in a major venue were almost paralyzing….. in addition to the hefty booth fee, I would have to consider travel to Orlando, lodging for the week, display structures to buy/build, and vasts amounts of inventory to accumulate.

Not to mention that once my family was made aware of my plan, they decided a trip to Disneyworld was in the cards.
So…. 5 tickets for Disney, please.

If ever there was a moment when I felt tempted to bury my head in the sand, inventing excuses to explain my un-readiness, my un-worthiness, to take a leap so ginormous…. THIS was the moment. It felt terrifying and impossible… that I knew it had to be attempted.

I need to pressure myself, push myself beyond my warm fuzzy sense of complacency, to do something meaningful and BIG for the sake of my art.
Or I can continue to fool myself into believing I’m a “real” artist, letting my easily manageable trickle of Etsy sales and a couple of small wholesale accounts lull me into a contented sense of accomplishment.

I chose to mail the application to MegaCon…. without putting much faith into an affirmative reply. Truth be told, I almost wanted to be denied… it would be so easy to “wait another year or two” until “I feel ready”. ….When my portfolio is larger. ….When I have extra money to spend on supplies and fixtures. ….When I have a few local craft fairs under my belt, and I feel experienced enough to tackle a big show.

I still had my Farmer’s Market booth to plan and prepare for, right?

Last night, I received an e-mail from MegaCon’s Assistant Director:

“We have received your Independent Press application and have assigned you to Indy Press booth 6…..

Oh. Crap.

I’ve been accepted?!

There is no use burying my head in the sand anymore.

This is it. Sink or swim… Mr. Darcy, the gang, and I are going to Florida next March.
Unless the Apocalypse comes first.

After Christmas, I spent a teensy bit of money buying supplies for my shop… including a nifty lamination machine for making bookmarks. Previously, I’d been using acrylic varnish to seal the card-stock and paper used for my bookmarks, but I wasn’t totally satisfied with the results. I wanted something flexible AND water-resistant AND durable, because my bookmarks suffer from constant abuse. Heehee

I’m a voracious reader, rarely leaving home without a book in hand, except for those quick trips where I’m mostly sitting behind the wheel of my car. I’m sure the other drivers wouldn’t appreciate glancing over at the vehicle beside them, to see my face buried in a novel and absentmindedly steering.

If the book is small enough, it gets crammed into my drawstring knapsack/purse, forced to occupy space with my checkbook, hairbrush, car keys, and whatever else is living inside the dark, cavernous depths of quilted fabric.
Larger books wind up at the bottom of tote bags I carry around on errands, laundry hampers taken outside to hang clothes (to read while they dry!), trips to the park in the kids’ wagon, or stuffed into my locker at work for a lunch-time alternative to the local newspapers and sleazy tabloids lying around our break-room.
Although occasionally someone will bring in a Time magazine ~ oh, the torment!

The laminating machine has been waiting patiently in my studio closet, so the other weekend I made a batch of bookmarks to destroy test their durability. Within 24 hours, I’d spilled hot chocolate onto one of them (the book itself was in my lap at the time ~ not on the table, thankfully! Haha!)
The liquid wiped right off, without leaving a stain! The bookmark looked great.

I do realize that given enough time, the edges will likely curl, and the plastic will get a bit scuffed with constant use/abuse… but I predict they will withstand quite a bit of abuse.

Each bookmark features one of my cat portraits, reproduced onto Ultra Premium Presentation paper using pigment inks, and coupled with a piece of complimentary colored card-stock on the back.

Feeling confident enough with their construction, I’ve begun to list individual bookmarks for sale in my Etsy shop. Eventually I hope to list them all, and bookmark sets as well!

I took a few photographs of them using old books as “props”, and made an awesome discovery! In my copy of The Forsyte Saga, I found a newspaper article clipping that dates all the way back to 1948. Here is the archived article online; apparently the book’s owner lived in Wisconsin at some point. The clipped article dealt with children’s illnesses and the ‘Five Feminine Hungers’ ~ which was an interesting glimpse into relationship counseling in the late 1940s.

There was also a vintage photograph of a toddler boy, cropped in half, as well as this vintage Hallmark card congratulating someone on their new arrival. The card was signed “With our love, Teresa and Frank Nesci”.

I’m not sure whether the book held special significance, or if these items were simply used as bookmarks!
As someone who enjoys collecting photographs of strangers, coupled by a voyeuristic urge to read grocery receipts and other discarded scraps, this was an exciting find! Unfortunately Google didn’t provide me with much info on the Nescis, the toddler’s photo was unsigned, and I have no idea who previously owned my copy of The Forsyte Saga.

Perhaps someday I’ll bump into that little boy ~ who must be in his 60′s now.

For anyone interested, I’m currently on the 3rd book of the Inheritance saga, by Christopher Paolini. I read the first novel, “Eragon”, in 2007 (shortly before seeing the cheesy film based on it)… and I’ve just recently taken up these books again, now that the author has completed the journey.

When friends inquire about the series, I’ve summed up the story as “a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars” ~ with a medieval landscape, fantasy characters (elves, dwarves, dragons, etc.), and a plot that pits a fractured rebellion against the evil Empire, with the assumed last Dragon Rider (a young, inexperienced boy who learns from a secret master) championed as their “only hope”.

It’s really good, I swear! LOL

I’m considering whether to dedicate a post to Eragon and Saphira once the journey is over. And I really should make Dragon Dommie into a bookmark for reading Inheritance; it would be appropriate, don’t you think?

This Easter, instead of participating in the traditional egg hunt, and coloring a couple dozen hard-boiled eggs, we decided to paint rocks.

You might attribute some Biblical symbolism to rock-painting, however it was mainly due to my unwillingness to make a large bowl of egg-salad. LOL
Dyed eggs have to be boiled and eaten, eventually, or else they’ll be wasted…. and I prefer my eggs raw for baking sweets!

These rocks will be lasting tokens of our Easter memories, and can function as home accents, bookends, votive holders, paper weights…. argued my logical side.
On an emotional level, I’ve always been in love with the shape, weight, and texture of natural rocks.

But these rocks wouldn’t stay “natural” for long! Heehee

We began our Easter afternoon with a “rock hunt” at the local park…

Looking back, we should have taken a road trip to the nearest river for smooth egg-shaped stones, but they were in a hurry to get home and paint them!

We took our three-baskets-full upstairs to my art studio, where I’d covered the carpet with plastic bags. I’d considered using cloth, but was afraid the drying paint would “glue” the rocks to the fabric….

They borrowed a few of my old brushes, and bottles of FolkArt Outdoor weather-proof craft paint.

Mia also decided to paint her face! Fortunately, it washed off with soap and water…

Lydia abandoned her brush, and opted for “hands-on” application.

Jacob lost his patience with the painting process early on, deserting us in favor of “Man Time” with Daddy: playing video-games. :OP

We let them dry for a couple of hours, then placed them inside one of the Easter baskets for display.

[Three days after Easter, the rocks have assimilated into their "toy" collection... to be found, and stepped on, all over the house.
You can't do that with real eggs!!! ]

I shared some new images on Facebook, of cherry blossoms, that I photographed when my daughter and I walked through our Funkstown neighborhood taking pictures.
I edited them quickly in Photoshop before posting them online, and promised everyone I’d write a tutorial explaining my simple process.

I began with this image, which was 4672 x 3104 pixels (at 300 dpi)… For anyone interested, I used a Pentax K-7, with a manual focus 28-70 mm zoom lens, set at 30 mm… f/4, ISO 100, yadda yadda…

Anyway, it’s just a typical shot of cherry blossoms taken in afternoon sunlight. You probably have hundreds of photographs just like this, as everybody takes pictures of flowers blooming; it’s like licking the cream inside Oreos… and while it’s a pretty image, I was itching to play around in Photoshop to make it special.

I started by cropping it into a square, 3100 x 3100 px, which gives me a print measuring roughly 10″x10″ at 300 dpi.
Then I adjusted the Levels to brighten the photo and increase the contrast slightly.

I created a duplicate layer – something I always do, so that I can play around with various color shades. I decreased the “blueness” of the second image using Color Variations. This gave the image a lovely greenish gold tint.

I set the Blending Mode of the duplicate image to Screen – 100% Opacity – and merged the two together into one layer. (Sorry, I forgot to take a screenshot of that).

But here is the result….

The background wasn’t fuzzy enough for my taste, so I used the Magic Wand tool to highlight the areas I wanted to Blur a bit more. I copied that area, Blurred using the Gaussian Blur filter, and once it was nice and blurry… merged it back together with the bottom image.

Here is the same photo, slightly Blurrier. LOL!

See the difference??
No?

Alrighty then. Moving along….

Next, I began experimenting with gradients on a separate layer. My usual “go to” for floral photography is a dark purple/golden yellow combination, so I tried that first using a diamond gradient:

However, I wasn’t too impressed with the results this time around. I tried a few other pairings: pink/gold, orange/yellow, blue/gold… before testing out a forest green and yellow combination:

(I usually have the lighter hue – yellow or gold – coming from the direction of the light source)

I really liked the effect of these colors, blended at Soft Light (82% Opacity).

But my photo was still missing “something”… It seemed a bit flat and lifeless.
I do have to be careful, as I tend to overwork my images, but I couldn’t resist dusting off my favorite bokeh filter:

A gift for you ~ Click bokeh image to download full-size, 2480x2000 px

This is a photograph I took a couple of years ago in our backyard ~ an intentionally blurry image, aimed at our tree canopy. The dark orange parts were originally the tree’s branches, the golden parts were its leaves, and the white area was the sky peeking through. When I unfocused my lens and blurred the image, the reflections of sunlight created thousands of these “bokeh lights”.
The colors were edited, of course, in Photoshop ~ where I added the orange/yellow gradient (my original bokeh image was green!), so that I could use this as a warm, glowing filter for bokeh effects.

Back to the Photoshop tutorial:

I took my bokeh design, cut-n-pasted it over my floral photo… and had to stretch it to cover the entire area, because my bokeh photo is only 2480 px (at 72 dpi) across. Then set the Blending Mode for Soft Light, 65%.

There was already some bokeh visible in the original photo, but I think this additional filter warms the background and makes it “sparkle”… for lack of a better word.

At this point, I considered it finished.

Looking through all the pictures we took (over 700 of them combined)… I had quite a few, nearly identical, close up shots of these blossoms. So I decided to create a four-part series using the same technique.

After my first image was complete, I used the same forest green/yellow gradient and bokeh filter on each additional photo, and spent only 10-15 minutes in Photoshop per image. (A couple of them did need slight adjustments in order to match).

Click to view larger...

Go ahead and download my favorite homemade bokeh filter, and play around with your own flower photographs. Remember: Photoshop can be very addictive!

These cherry blossom photos are available as high-quality prints from our new Etsy shop: TaraFlyPhotography. Printed on archival cotton rag paper with pigment inks. They look gorgeous when framed and hung together in a group.

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice….”

~ Robert Frost

We’ve had an unusually hot March this year, with temperatures reaching the low 80s, prompting me to wonder why we haven’t encouraged that poor old Groundhog to retire.
With his prediction of continuing winter (What winter?? One measly dusting of snow that melted within 24 hours?), he has proven over the last 126 years that he knows next to nothing about the relation between his shadow and the extended weather forecast.

Let him move to Florida, where they rarely experience a winter snowstorm… but rainshowers happen like clockwork every afternoon at 4:00PM.

All I know is that cats are terrible at predicting weather, or else they wouldn’t stand at the door begging to go outside, only to change their minds when their feet get a little wet.

We’ve been anxious to enjoy the warm weather, and Joe was excited for an opportunity to take more photographs once nature began turning shades of green ~ we had already covered nearly every bare tree and patch of earth in town.
Usually we plan our outings as a family, take the kids to the park, or a scenic road trip.

Last weekend, though, I agreed to let Lydia accompany me on a walk through town ~ just the two of us, while her siblings remained at home with Dad.

She brought along our Pentax istDL, and I used Joe’s new camera, a Pentax K-7. We remained within the Pentax family mainly to share the lenses that he has collected over the years.

We took over 700 pictures between us, many of them were nearly identical, although it was really interesting to see how she interpreted her surroundings in ways very different from mine.

She found a piece of discarded pink chalk on the sidewalk, and arranged her own still-life.

Although we started out with me leading the way, and giving her a few pointers… oftentimes I found myself following in her footsteps, trying to see whatever it was that she saw.

We even captured each other in our shots… occasionally on purpose, usually by accident.

Lydia has been watching my progress with on-line selling with increasing fascination… and has often asked whether she can open an Etsy shop with my help.
I hate to tell her “no”, although I’m stretched thin between trying to work on my own projects and helping Joe to manage his.

She does have potential, like many children do, with that innocent and untrained way of seeing things. And teaching her the basic skills required to sell artwork, manage money, and handle customer relations would benefit her a great deal in the future.

It’s either this… or a lemonade stand.

[Mom's note: ALL photographs featured in this post, with the exception of the 4th photo, were taken by Lydia Jenkinson, aged 9. Her mother is very proud of her.]