Reiterating...

I Need Your Pretty Face!

I'm setting myself a new challenge for 2012. I want to do a portrait sketch a day. I'm not feeling too anal about making it through the year, but I think it'll be fun to see how long I can keep it going. They'll be quick, loose sketches based on the Facebook profile pictures of fans of my Facebook page. I need 366 faces (being optimistic), so help a girl out! I don't want my inbox overflowing with images, or have to go looking lots of different places for pictures. 366 is a lot of pictures, and I'm a busy mom with next to no time for art. So to donate your face to my cause, please go to my Facebook page, click 'like', and then comment on one of my posts calling for faces. There are a couple of posts already. I'm sure I'll put up more soon. That's it!

 

In other news, my Etsy store is updated, go check out what I have available! Or come see it in my studio.  Contact me to set a time, or visit me during Denver's First Friday Art Walk, I'm upstairs in Space Gallery.

I'm on Etsy!

I have oodles of pictures to share in the near future from my first art show, and already art show #2 approaches. 

In the meantime, I finally have my Etsy shop up and running.

Please go and check out my current pieces for sale.  New pieces are being added all the time, so make sure to check back.

Find me on Facebook and other BIG news!

Maintaining multiple forms of contact is darn near impossible for me these days.  Having two littles under the age of five really demands a lot of my time and attention, so I rarely get to work on my art or salsa business and keeping up blogs, email, and various other forms of contact is just impossible.  So, please come find me on Facebook.  I don't use the phone that much, I almost never email, blogging has long been rare since I got my first little.  But!  I do Facebook.  To find me on Facebook, you can either follow my link here, or you can search the pages for Elisabeth Hurley (Visual Space). 

Now I'm not saying I won't be posting at all here anymore.  The blog is not totally abandoned.  I'm just going to continue to post pretty infrequently and if you want to know more about what's going on and see all my latest work, you should 'like' me on Facebook as well.  I'm updating the Facebook page a fair bit these days because of my BIG news.....

I'm renting studio space for a month to try out working like a "real artist".  And I'm LOVING it.  One of the best things I've ever done for myself.  I wish I'd done this YEARS ago.  Here are a few pictures my friend Teddi Maull of Picture The Day took of me and my studio mates.  For more, you can check out my albums on my Facebook page.  I'm also updating the page almost every day while I'm working with sneak peeks of works in progress and finished pieces.

This last picture is me (far right) and my studio mates. We're all in this together.  We're also going to be having our first art show as part of the First Friday Art Walk next month, August 5th, 6-9pm.  Come see us and check out what we've been working on!  We're upstairs in Space Gallery on Santa Fe Drive in Denver.

What will we do after our month is up?  Well, if finances allow (come buy some artwork please!) at least two of us will continue another month.  Otherwise, it'll just be a good month to look back on and remember that we were actively doing what we loved, and taking our art seriously as we never have before (well, I know at least two of us never have).  This studio is one of the top 5 best things I've ever done.  I hope I can continue, but if not, it will still have been a very good thing.

iPad art?

This morning I did a little playing around with art creation on the iPad.

What do you think? Is the iPad something we can really use to make art? Or is it just a fun toy to play around with? It is kind of fun and freeing to work with. I can see it as a great tool for sketching for sure. I'm envisioning doing some travel sketches on my next trip somewhere. It doesn't have the same charm for me as a sketch done with tangible materials. It doesn't have the temporal and spacial 'realness' of a paper sketch where the drawing medium has interacted with the paper in unexpected and almost imperceptible ways. But it seems like it could have its own merits.

Here are some iPad art 'pieces' I found:




Click on the above image to see some of the artist's other terrific celeb portraits.

And this artist has some astonishing what he calls "finger paintings".





And I found this and other amazing iPad 'paintings' in a Flickr iPad art group pool.




They're certainly impressive, but do they have the same value as something with more spacial and temporal realness?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

2x2

Baby's First Trip to the Park

February, 2010

An armful and a lapful...

A 'handful' is for sissies...

Brothers

Knitted baby

There's never shortage of knitted and crocheted yumminess in my family...

New baby

February 11, 2010
I had a home birth.  It was difficult, but then this little heartbreaker arrived...

Dolls

Nesting

A few days before baby came...

El Chapulín Colorado!!!

This little guy was in February finally willing to wear the full upper half of his Halloween costume that we made him.

The Bed My Dad Built -- From Scratch!

Back in January, part of the nesting process before my second son arrived involved a new, organic mattress, and a frame to hold it courtesy of my awesome dad. Here is the building of our family bed...

Playing on Photoshop

Boy is this blog out of date! Have to spend some time catching up on posts.
If you want to keep more up to date on what I'm doing, check out my Facebook page.
Did I mention I had a baby? Hmm... I wonder why I haven't been keeping up with blogs and art.
Today though I was fiddling around with some images of my boys on Photoshop Elements and this is what I came up with...

ANOTHER blog experiment?

I can't even manage to keep posting on the blogs I have, but I'm testing a new one for those who might be interested.  I'm trying out TUMBLR to see what the fuss is about.  And I'm using the blog to collect bits of inspiration online, to post some short bits of personal stuff, and whatever else tickles my fancy in a more micro-bloggy sort of way.  If you want to see what I'm into right now, check it out.  The name & url are sort of both temporary because I haven't come up with something better yet.  I'll warn you if I decide to change it obviously.

Playing with Nostalgia

So sorry to have been gone so long, but my brain has just been completely fried this pregnancy.  I wasn't able to finish the portraits for the giveaway and I have been struggling the few times I have attempted writing something.

But I did a little something today!  With the impending arrival of our second child, I've found myself needing to return to the images of the arrival of our first child.  I started playing around with some images from that time and thought I'd share what I came up with.

I miss film, and the soft nostalgia that film grain imparts.  Although I'm kind of against 'faking' things like film looks and film grain, I still do go there at times.  And I've been forever dissatisfied with options that Photoshop Elements offers for adding grain.  So I looked online and found a random grainy photo to model my grain after.  And after much playing and tweaking, I turned this photo my husband took of me holding my son at 2 days old...

...into this:

I'm pretty pleased with it.  It's not perfect, and this experiment makes me want to just return to film to get the real beauty back.  Ahhh... film is just so beautiful.  But still, I kind of like what I achieved here.

[EDIT] I'm a little frustrated with the sharpening that I think Flickr did here.  It's softer in the version I made.  Looks better if you click through and view it larger.

O Tannenbaum, how knitted are your leaves?

If I had years to work on it, and the inclination to work that long on such a thing, I would SO make a tree like this:

Yep, that's totally knitted!

I have seen some Christmas trees and other little trees on ravelry, and they are often super cute, but they are miniatures.  How cool would it be to have a life-size knitted tree?  Beats my plastic one any day!

Find these trees on Ravelry.com: 1, 2, and 3