Kat Eye Studio

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Back to Beginner

There are different kinds of learning. There is the learning of an expert, polishing and honing a skill to perfection. Getting better and better at a chosen craft. Creating good art, then better art, then great art. Someday, maybe even amazing art.

Then there is the learning of a beginner, growing by leaps and bounds each day. Getting better fast, up a steep learning curve. And creating lots of crap along the way. 

There is pleasure in both, but I do love being a beginner! It’s so much fun to sit down and be continuously engaged in the process. To learn something new each day.

What if I do this. Let me try that. It worked out great! Or not so great. Or awful… undo. Undo!

It’s just hard to go back to not creating good work. Occasionally, I create something I like, like these leaves, but I have no idea how to extend that into the next piece, or the next. I have no style, no focus. It’s all experimentation. 


I know it’s part of the learning process. To grow you have to accept that you do not start out with mastery. You have to willing to be a beginner again, starting from a place where you will create more mess than good. The only way to get to the real art, your art, is through the process. 

That’s the fun and that’s also the frustration.

I’m hopeful some good art will come out on the other side. And if not? That’s ok too. I’m having fun creating again. Learning again. 

Right now, that is what matters most.


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Back to the Forest

Summer in Oregon is awesome. After what is often a long, gray winter, the feel of the sun on my face and the ground under my bare feet is delicious. I love being warm enough to lose the sweaters and socks for a while. I love the long days of sunshine, the morning hikes with my dog, open windows at night. All of it. 

But there is a downside to Summer. It also continues to be a challenge for me creatively. I’m all over the place. My bare trees are gone, I don’t have a focus. I don’t have anything that brings my work together. I experiment, and this year, nothing is sticking. So I’m back to the forest for a while, back to the trees. 


There are multiple reasons I like trees as a subject so much, but this summer I’ve realized a really important one — these images fit my creative process.

When I made the decision to stop the abstract project, I thought I would continue with the figurative work. But it hasn’t happened, even though I have tons of conceptual ideas in my head and on paper. Why??

The challenge, I’ve found, is the advance planning these types of images take. If I have a concept, I can’t just sit down and create whenever it comes to me. I have to go around collecting the imagery I want to use in that concept. That takes time and energy. It was easier to do on vacation, where I had lots of free time and people around to model. I typically don’t have this kind of random imagery that works for the figurative work on my camera roll. So what I’ve been finding is that when I have time to sit down and create, typically early mornings, I can’t create that work unless I’ve planned ahead.

It turns out, I don’t like planning ahead in my art. I like to capture images as I move through my day, and then play with them later. Images of things that catch my eye, where I can stop and play with composition for a few moments as I capture a photo. They aren’t images of things so much as images of light and lines. It’s the interesting lines I like to photograph. They are the inspiration. Ten minutes of photo play can sometimes fuel my mornings for a week, maybe more.

Because my art is not just about creating a finished piece of a concept. It’s also about meditation. It’s my own personal escape into a quiet space that takes my mind away from everything else going on in my life. Playing with the image, a single image, and seeing what I can do with it brings its own unique joy. 

The process of creating is more important than the finished piece.

I recently listened to a great podcast by Malcom Gladwell (Revision History Episode 7, Hallelujah) where he talks about different kinds of creators. There are those who have a concept and do things all at once, and then there are those who don’t have a concept in mind but eventually reach completion through experiment and revision. I’m the latter. It takes longer, but it’s the way that works for me.

So the trees are back. Not just because they are easier, because I certainly don’t believe art should always be easy, but because creating this way makes me happy. I need these morning moments of quiet and clarity in my life right now more than I need to create boundary-pushing art. So this is what I will do, what I will create.

What works for you? Are you a conceptual creator or an experimental creator? What matters more to you, the completed piece or the process? Think about it, and allow yourself to be true to the right process for you.

PS – Don’t miss out on the chance for me to create you a new profile photo! Read more here.

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An Abstract Question

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m stuck.

This #30edits abstract project I was so excited about is kicking my butt. I haven’t created a new one in almost a week, and I’m not really motivated to get back into it. Here’s the last…


So what is it that is leaving me flat about the whole thing?

Sure, it’s fun. It’s been good to see where each individual piece goes. But it feels like there is no purpose, no cohesiveness to the whole group of work. They are a series of individual pieces that don’t really relate to each other. And so far, they are not pushing me to much out of my comfort zone.

I’ve realized a few things lately, as I’ve worked through this project… 

Since I’ve sat with my art for several weekends at art fairs, I’ve realized that there is something those winter trees give me, besides inspiration. They give me a cohesiveness to my work which is otherwise very disparate in style. Even in my last #30edits project, which resulted in vastly different pieces, they related to each other since they started with the same photograph. That creates a connection between the work at least in my own mind. A connection I can talk about with others. These abstracts have no relation to each other. For some reason that bugs me.

Maybe that bugs me because it feels that they have no story on their own. The only story in them is the processing itself, the project itself. Even though what I love about abstract art is the emotion of it, it doesn’t feel that there is an emotional driving force in the creation of them. They are interesting, but when they are done, they aren’t conveying something more to me, something inside of me, in the way my art does usually. I decided I don’t want to share the starting photograph of these, because it ruins the magic of the abstract. But maybe it also ruins the magic of creation in a way, that there is no clear tie to the starting photograph, which is usually so important to my process. You can’t tell that it started as this one thing and was transformed into something new but related.

So I’m trying to decide… Do I continue the #30edits Abstract project or do I stop? Will I find inspiration if I push through this stuck place? Or have I learned my lesson and I should focus on the thing that has given me some inspiration lately… The figure?


Trying to decide. And in the meantime, I’m barely creating. 

That’s probably answer enough, isn’t it? Funny how it took writing a blog post for me to figure it out. 

Time to follow my inspiration. #30edits Abstract is on hold, indefinitely.

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How well do you know yourself?

Last week, my husband asked me: “Are you still doing that abstract project?”

Me: “Yes, I am.”


Him: “I haven’t seen anything lately. Isn’t it supposed to be every day for thirty days?”

Me: “No. It’s whenever I get to it.”

If you’ve been following me in this project, you’ll know I’m on a bit of a hiatus. With back-to-back fairs and a looming vacation there has been so little time for creation.

That’s why I don’t set time limits on these #30edits projects. I know myself. I know I’m not an everyday-come-what-may kind of creator. I know that having a deadline on creating art will make it stressful for me, not fun. I would kill myself to achieve and then resent it.

That’s not a good formula for making art.

That doesn’t mean that challenge and struggle and pushing through boundaries aren’t all part of the creative process. They absolutely are.

But the challenge does not have to be in every dimension, so I take it out of the dimension of time. That works for me.

You will definitely see more #30edits abstracts soon, and I’ve been experimenting with some collage art as well. Lots of creative material to work with.

Perfect timing too… I just got an iPad Pro and Pencil! After three different people, whose iPhone art I like and respect, told me it would rock my world, I decided it was time. I’m looking forward to creating art on the big screen. 

When I have time, of course.

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Lessons from #30edits

What happens when you edit the same photograph thirty times? You get a collection of images that are different, yet relate to each other through common elements. You get a surprising burst of creativity. And you might just get some of the best work you have created in a while.

Kat-Sloma-News-7118

I know editing the same photograph thirty times sounds like something difficult to do. The words “boredom” or “stuck” quickly come to mind. But I found the exact opposite to be the case. This #30edits challenge was one of the best things I’ve done for my creativity in a while. Things seemed to evolve easily. And while there were moments of difficulty — places I had to push myself to get started in a new direction, or continue through to something worthwhile — overall it was simpler than I thought.

Most of the time, to get things going in a new direction, I just needed to try a new app or a new feature within an app. The possibilities really are limitless with the variety of iPhone apps available! Near the end, I spent more time editing within iColorama, an app with fantastic capability but not the easiest to use. The added push of this challenge helped me come a long way up the learning curve for this app, as well as help me get deeper into features of apps I use all the time.

One of the most surprising things I noticed as I progressed through more and more edits was how my point of view on that starting photograph changed. I shifted from thinking of it as “the image” to thinking of it as “the elements.” I looked at how I could use the elements of the image in different ways. How could I repeat, layer, invert, rotate or otherwise change the elements? I broke things apart and put them back together as something new. I wasn’t tied to keeping the same connection to the starting photographic elements and composition I have historically maintained in my editing process. Another invisible barrier to creativity, broken down.

The bottom line? I could have easily kept going beyond thirty edits.

Here are all of the images in the series, printed and hanging on my studio wall. I had to purchase two more of my favorite Photo Ropes to see them all together, but it was worth it! I will be exhibiting these in February, so I want to live with them for a while to figure out my favorites.

2016-01-09 14.53.50

Several other artists on Instagram joined me in the challenge. You can see all of the group’s work tagged with #30edits here. Some participants are still in progress, and some are finished. I asked a few of the participants who were furthest along to share their #30edits thoughts and experiences with us, along with their original image and favorite edit, so you can learn from them too.

Beth @shutterhuff

 

Original

Original

At first I thought one image for a whole 30 days? No way. I had done something similar with the #100dayproject last year although I wasn’t limited to only one image. But the more I thought about it, I figured that if I would pick an image where I could set a stage to do some compositing, then maybe it could work.

The image I picked worked well for compositing. Previously I had used mostly the DianaPhotoApp to blend my images together. I used this project to explore some new apps and to dig deeper into ones that I already used. My favorites being, iColorama, Juxtaposer, and two I hadn’t used much before, Union and Silhouette.

I still have a few more to make it to 30. It has definitely been harder than I thought it would be. I was glad to hear that we didn’t have to do one a day for 30 days, that would have made it so much more difficult, I don’t think I would have kept at it.

My favorite part of the project? Even if I got to the point where I thought I couldn’t do anything new with my image, I just kept working with it and something always appeared!

Fairy Tales 11/30

Fairy Tales 11/30

Janet @jreid1031

 

Original

Original

I love a challenge and this one did just what I hoped it would. It made me stretch and learn new things. It challenged me to take a simple image and see if I could make it look completely different each time I edited it. The first 15 or so weren’t too difficult because I love to edit on my iPad and I used a lot of the editing tools I’m familiar with . But after that I had to start really digging and looking for things I had never tried before. That for me was the real value of this challenge. Could I make it part of a portrait? Could I make it a fantasy? A self portrait? What was the least amount of editing I could do? What was the most?

So thanks very much, Kat, for pushing me along my artistic journey. It was really fun! I loved seeing what everyone else did and learned so much from them as well.

Rose 30/30

Rose 30/30

Shelley @sbenja823

 

Original

Original

I was intrigued by your 30 edits when I first read about it, but could not imagine doing 30 edits on any one photo. Then I took a photo that I knew immediately I could edit in more than one way. The first 10 edits flew by. Then I started pushing the envelope a bit. I saw what others were doing and got some inspiration from them. The last 10 though were the hardest. What could I do now that was different than before. I came up with a theme of 4 seasons and by then only had 4 more to go. One of my last edits is my favorite. Everything worked in that image and it is by far the strongest of the bunch. I would not have created this if I had not pushed through this project. And by the way, I did and posted 31 edits. There were probably another 4 or 5 more that never made the cut. This really was an amazing project in creativity.

I can see doing variations of this challenge for myself to continue this type of creative exploration.

29 of 30

29 of 30

Thank you Beth, Janet and Shelley for joining me in the challenge and for sharing your thoughts with us here! Seeing your work progress throughout the challenge really inspired me, and I thank you for that as well as the companionship of having others working through the same challenge together. It was so much fun, I will probably do it again sometime in the future and I hope you will join me again.

Are you in need of a little creative boost? Are you up for a challenge? Don’t wait for me, you can start on your own thirty edits anytime. Just use #30edits on Instagram. I’ll see you there!

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The Pleasure of Experimenting

I’ve been experimenting with some new (to me) apps this last week, and what a pleasure it has been to try something new in my creative process! It feels good to get out of my comfort zone. It reminds me that experimentation and play are big keys to the creative process, and even a little time spent in this mode can go a long way.

Here are a couple of the apps and edits….

Since I like to incorporate the moon and space into my images now and then, the Alien Sky app by Brain Fever is one I decided to try. I’ve seen it used for a while, but wasn’t sure it would fit my style. Turns out, the app has a lot of customization and settings which makes it useful for many styles, including mine. What fun!

  

This week friend and fellow iPhone photographer Lorraine Richey presented about her process at our monthly PhotoArts Guild meeting, which inspired me to try another Brain Fever app, called Circular. This app takes your image and twists it, creating a tiny planet or much, much more. I used Circular on one image to create an abstract background, layered it with a tree image, then used Circular again to twist things around. Way cool!  

 
I kept trying different variations and didn’t want to stop playing!  

Have you tried a new app lately? I’ve tried a few here and there recently, but they’ve mostly felt the same as other apps with nothing super unique. These two add something new and different to my creative toolbox, which means they get to stay.

Off to play!!

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