The Kat Eye View of the World - Kat Eye Studio

February 19, 2015 by Kat

Mail Art Extravaganza!

Wow, I think this is the best year for mail art ever! I have been receiving some amazing decorated envelopes for the Liberate Your Art postcard swap this year. To date, 65 envelopes have arrived. We are now in the lull… the early birds are done and the bulk of the participants will mail in the next two weeks. It happens every year!

I got behind on photographing envelopes last week, so this week’s update on the mail art is HUGE. Enjoy the Mail Art Extravaganza!

My address has never looked so good! Kate from Illinois does amazing lettering, which you might expect from someone who’s blog is named KateLetterplay. Don’t you think it’s cool how well her lettering complements the Marsden Hartley art on the stamp?

Charlotte from Maryland highlights the “Date to Liberate” as March 15 — SWAP DAY!! (By the way, for anyone who lives in Oregon, you are invited to come over and help me stick address labels and stamps on postcards on Swap Day! Contact me if you are interested.)

Jewels from Michigan has a question on the front of her envelope…

…and the best answer ever on the back! Yes! This one just makes me smile.

Patricia from Oregon has a message for you. I agree!

Laurie from Florida created this gorgeously painted envelope. Can you see the texture? It’s feels lovely to handle! The last few years I’ve been seeing these gorgeous butterfly stamps gracing your envelopes. They always seem like such a beautiful complement to your art! I got curious and did a little bit of research on them. The artist who created all of these butterfly images is Tom Engeman, and you can learn more about him here.

“The other Kat,” as she identifies herself to me, sent a lovely collage from Virginia. I love the message she added, “Art to be liberated waiting inside.” Soon Kat, soon! (And see, another beautiful butterfly!)

This envelope from Jan in California is artfully done. I love how the swirls just lead me across the envelope. Such beauty and grace to find in the mail!

Carol from Washington goes classic, with some ink and stamps. Simple. Effective. Beautiful.

Speaking of simple, a few swooshes of ink and a hand cancellation make this envelope artful! From Sherry in Alaska, who wrote this great quote on the back of her envelope: Art is intelligence at play! – Albert Einstein.

Bethany from Florida used washi tape to spell out my favorite initials – “LYA” for “Liberate Your Art.” That’s the abbreviation I personally use in all of my notes and reminders about the postcard swap! Who wants to write out “Liberate Your Art” all the time? LYA, all the way!

This gorgeous mixed media piece is from Dee in California. Do you guys know how hard it is for me to open some of these envelopes? They are too pretty.

I opened an envelope from Texas, and was surprised to find it was really from Luis in Mexico! Luis included a letter within the envelope, which explains all of the personal symbolism of the images he chose for the piece. Beautiful!

And then there was the inside. More mail art waiting to be discovered, along with this postcards. Thanks Luis! Your envelope was an amazing treat.

Here was something new… Have you ever opened an “envelope” with a seam ripper? I hadn’t, until this one from Donna in New Mexico. It’s a decorated piece of fabric, sewn shut. What a fantastic idea!!

Do you see what I mean about some of these being too pretty to open? Here was the back of the “envelope.” Or should I call it a pouch?

I have a thing for stamps, especially ones from abroad, and so Debbie‘s envelope, from the UK, threw me for a loop. At first I thought that “Mailmaker” stamp was a cool arty stamp, but it’s actually the name of her blog. I don’t think it’s a real stamp at all!

Catherine, another artist from the UK, sent me this one. I love it when I see “par avion” on the envelope, a sign that art has come a long, long way to be liberated.

What a lovely tree from Mikki in Colorado! Mikki is a ceramics artist, but she reminds us that all you need is a pen and an envelope, and you can create some wonderful mail art.

And last, but definitely not the least, are these fabulous characters helping Wendy liberate her art from Texas. It’s a bird! It’s a fish! It’s the mail!

Whew! That’s a LOT of mail art, wouldn’t you say. And more on the way! I can’t wait to see what arrives next week.

February 17, 2015 by Kat

Stick a Fork in Me…

…I’m done! My iPhone photography manuscript is complete, packaged and ready to send. It will be in the mail today, heading to Amherst Media and the next phase of production.

Whew, what a project. 24034 words and 270 photo examples and diagrams. And that’s for a small book… It’s only planned to be 128 pages. I can now imagine the work that went into creating some of these larger photography tomes on my bookshelf. I’m glad my project was not that big!

I should feel excited, right? I guess I do. But what I mostly feel is relieved that I made the deadline with a week to spare, and a little bit empty. Every spare moment the last couple of months has been about finishing the book, so having all of that time and mental space freed up at once is somewhat unnerving.

I’ve been keeping a list of projects I need to do “when the book is done.” I guess that starts now.

But first, I think I’m going to go for a hike. The forest is calling me. We’ve had some beautiful weather, and I haven’t had the time to go out hiking until now.

Next, I’ll clean my studio. As you can see, it’s a bit of a mess. Some things just fall by the wayside when a deadline looms near.

And then? It’s like a blank page, waiting for me to fill. I think I might keep it that way, at least for a little while.

February 12, 2015 by Kat

A Moment of Convergence

In an artistic life, there are moments when everything comes together: The subject you discover, the piece you create, the audience you find. They all converge and you tap into something special, creating a piece of art that resonates with others.

That happened last week with this piece, Stillness.

If you ask me, I won’t be able to tell you why this struck a chord. I’m not sure what it is about this image, compared to all of the others I’ve recently created, that connects. I was talking to a friend about it, and she tried to put it into words what resonated for her about this image, “It’s as if I saw something, really saw it, in a different way. You showed it to me that way.”

That sort of caught me off guard. Maybe I’d forgotten and needed to be reminded, but isn’t that what artists do? Artists show us the world with a different point of view. The best pieces of art are the ones that make you stop and think, or better yet, feel something.

It is awesome when that happens with something you create. You feel like you really connected with someone. Maybe tapped into something greater than yourself.

The hard part is, and maybe this is just me, I can’t do it on purpose. I can’t predict which of my work will make that connection. I create, and create, and create, and once in a while things converge. All I can do is that ongoing creation, following the direction my heart and the image wants to go, and the I let it go into the world and see the result.

The thing I do know… If you don’t do this kind or work — creating again and again, practicing, trying new things, and sometimes falling flat on your face — then you won’t ever find these beautiful moments of convergence.

And they, my friend, are totally worth it.

February 5, 2015 by Kat

Impressions of Artista Impresso (A Mobile Tutorial)

I’ve been playing with a new app this week, and thought I would share! JixiPix Software has released a new app for both iOS and Android, Artista Impresso, which creates an impressionistic painting style out of your photos. I love the JixiPix apps for their adjustability, and this is another great one for the app arsenal. Let’s take a look at how it works.

But first, a quick Mother-in-Law update: They found no sign of cancer in her nodes, so we are all incredibly grateful for that. She should be going home today. She has come through surgery fine although pain has been an issue. My husband said she described the pain as “wearing a barbed wire bra.” Ow!! Yeah, I think men and women alike can sympathize with that. Thank you for all of your thoughts and prayers for my family around this. I definitely feel the love of my blog community!!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

It all starts, of course, with a photograph captured with ProCamera. We’ve had a lot of foggy mornings this winter, and the greyish cast to the trees comes from the fog in this one.

The first step is to add some color, which is done with a series of layers in Mextures and Snapseed. This is the image that I pulled into Artista Impresso:

Most of the JixiPix apps perform similarly. You load a photo, select a preset, and then fine tune the options. If you don’t want to click through the presets, you can use the Randomize feature to randomly try on presets. You can also Undo your changes, which is much appreciated when you are playing around with options.

For Artista Impresso, once I’ve loaded my photo, I can select between the two preset menus: Alla Prima and En Plein Air. Within each menu are TONS of preset options. You can see I’ve selected “Sorbet” from the En Plein Air Presets for a purpley-pink color tone. (Note: All screenshots are from an iPad. The layout is the similar on an iPhone, but the icons take up more of the screen space.)

Now we customize! Let’s walk through the menu options. We can change the brush size, color enhancement and painted edge. This is where I go in and get rid of the annoying edge that all of the presets add. I think the edge is supposed to make it look more like a “real” painting, but since I’m always blending the output with something else, I want it gone. Thankfully, in this app, I can eliminate it.

Next we can change the substrate texture and strength, choosing between canvas and linen.

For En Plein Air Presets, you can now adjust your color palette. You’ll notice the En Plein Air Presets have a stronger color shift than the Alla Prima presets. The “Limited” style keeps more of your original color than “Full.” You can also shift the Palette, creating more varation in your output. I didn’t make adjustments here for my example.

For Alla Prima Presets, there is a different option in this location, called Artistic Finish. This allows you to modify the colors by choosing an alternate color and texture overlay.

Finally, both presets allow you to create a “Detail” area of the image. In the selected Detail area, you can select a more finely detailed brush stroke than the rest of the image. Move the center dot to center on your desired detail area, and then change the size of the detail area by dragging the individual points of the ellipse. Don’t use two fingers to change the size of the ellipse. That just pans and zooms the image (a nice feature in itself).

When you like what you’ve got, you go back home and save. The output is saved at the same resolution as the starting image.

Here’s the final output from Artista Impresso:

For me, this output becomes a layer in an overall edit. A “painted” image like this will provide color and texture variation, as well as softness to the lines in the photograph, as I blend it with other images. Here is the final image, which was the result of using Snapseed, Mextures, Autopainter, Autopainter II, XnView Photo FX, Image Blender and Artista Impresso:

I want to point out how much variation there is in the detail. Since I post low resolution images online, you can’t always see this, so I zoomed in here:

While you don’t necessarily notice this detail as you look at a whole image, this subtle variation in texture and color is what gives an image depth and interest, especially when printed. That’s one of the reasons I use so many apps blended together. As I’m working on an image, I look at the overall results but I’m also zooming in to see what is going on at a detail level.

The image I shared earlier this week, Holding my Breath, also used Artista Impresso as one of the layers. JixiPix Software has a full range of mobile apps as well as Photoshop and Lightroom plugins. Definitely worth checking out!

Enjoy your impressionistic photo editing!

January 29, 2015 by Kat

It’s time for some Mail Art!

It’s time to shift gears a little bit on the blog, sharing a few pieces of art that have arrived in the mail as part of the Liberate Your Art 2015 Postcard Swap! I’ve received 10 envelopes so far from locations far and wide, including from The Netherlands, Norway and France. It is early, and there is still plenty of time to join and make your postcards before the deadline. You can learn more and sign up here.

This is always exciting, when the decorated envelopes start arriving. I want to share a few with you! If the artist provided a link on their postcard, I’ve included it, otherwise we will just have to leave our appreciation in the comments here.

This first one is from Christie in Florida. This envelope was a cornucopia of detail! So many layers and fun stuff to see, I couldn’t decide quite where to focus my photograph until the celebration of “Mail Art” caught my eye!

This gorgeous painted envelope came from Peggy in Colorado. (My home state! Go Broncos! Oh wait, they lost in the playoffs already…) Peggy brings to life a wonderful bare tree structure in some of my favorite colors. (Were you pandering to the swap leader, Peggy? Very smart of you! Here you are on the blog!)

Kate‘s doodles arrived on her envelope from Michigan, bringing to mind music and electrical engineering symbols! Do you see the resistors, capacitors and ground symbols? (Oops, the techie in me is showing…) I’m not sure if that was intentional, but I like it. What do you see?

Finally, we have one from Lisa in Virginia. I love it when the stamps are integrated so nicely with the envelope art!

And a lovely message was included on the back…

That’s what mail art is all about: Encouragement and inspiration. There is nothing like a beautiful piece of art arriving in the mail to make you smile! Liberating your art really does “let your heart speak to other’s hearts.”

If you haven’t joined in the swap yet, you still have time!

« Previous Page