Showing posts with label Rome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rome. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Digital Art and More Image Magic

I have continued working with GIMP, my image manipulation program, the last few weeks.

Paris Butterflies Digital Collage by Anita Barnard

This little Paris Butterfly collage was my most ambitious to date, if only because it had more layers than I had used before in a piece and some fidgety placement and sizing and levels of differing transparency that I had to figure out. I am still playing with how to get to the right place for what are probably some pretty basic commands, and making this digital collage was definitely a learning experience for me. And satisfying in that I am happy with how it turned out.

Starry Christmas Night


I had an idea of Santa's sleigh flying through Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night sky. After I found the vintage image of Santa and his sleigh that I wanted, I spent about 200 years clearing out all the background from in between the sleigh runners and all the little reindeer antlers...with a tiny erase brush and the image at 400% most of the time. (Okay, maybe not quite that long, but my hand was stiff and cramping a bit before I was done. There's probably an easier way of removing a background from an image that isn't all white or just one color, and I'd love some guidance if anyone can tell me what that method is). I am a big van Gogh fan, and I liked how this looks.



Having done all the work clening up the Santa image, I then found some great vintage postcards of Paris and Rome over at The Graphics Fairy blog, and had fun positioning Santa to fly past the Eiffel Tower and over the Coliseum.

Many of my new images - and variations, as well as images of my hand cut physical collages and art have been put on some things like cards, mugs and shirts over on Zazzle. Here are some examples.









Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Archeologia and Collage

Roman Layers (maybe) 8x10


Here's another collage I created earlier this week. Roman Layers is just the working title...I had to  name the image file something...but it does convey a sense of my thoughts while I was creating the piece.

When I was in Rome with my friend Michelle a few years ago, we visited a church just a few blocks from the coliseum, the Basilica di San Clemente,

Fresco of San Clemente in the lower church
Mithraeum, designed to look like a cave



a 12th century basilica that is built on top of a 4th century church, still underneath, with many existing frescoes. Then we descended further to a 3rd century Mithraic temple.


It amazed and still amazes me how all these layers of history exist. How the present day church is at street level, and the many centuries of all that preceding life has moved down, down...


I was definitely thinking about that trip and those reflections about the layers of history when I was designing and making this collage.

As well as images and bits of painting, the piece also includes text in Italian from two sources and Latin text. Archeologia, Italian for archeologyis a possible title for the collage, as well as the Latin,
Scientia Antiquitatis. Preferences and suggestions are welcomed.

This post, and lots of other stuff to look at,  is linked to this blog .


Update: "Roman Layers" is now up on my shop.