Quiet Night, Q.Cassetti, 2010, pen and ink/digitalI was thrilled to discover this interesting, thought provoking tool, Visual Thesaurus, which for $19. you can access all sorts of ways to connect words with words, which then connects ideas with ideas that one might not have on your own. I found it when looking up names for a company that is just being started and found the more I used this tool, the more ideas sparked about illustration, relationships that are interesting and odd. I cannot recommend this highly enough as it is a wonderful tool for naming, for language and writing as well as a prompt for ideas when one is feeling stale and stupid.
This illustration is the first part of the coloration of the silhouette series (see in The Atelier section above). I did something new (imagine) that produced some interesting results (this piece is not quite done). I took a pen and ink illustration and flopped it in photoshop. Then, I reversed the illustration (what is white is black and black/white. I saved this as a high res jpg (at 600 dpi). I brought this image into illustrator, and started laying shapes of color on top of this original, reversed image. I used the Multiply filter (via transparency) which allowed me to work very quickly to lay in the color/change the color/and then use opaque shapes on top/behind these multiplied colors. FAST. and allowed one to make changes really quickly. I am intrigued by this--possibly moving to single color illustrations (beyond black and white) and laying the color in on other pieces. I may do one more today just for kicks.
Today begins the egg drawings. You shouldnt see anything for a week or so, and then, Annie bar the door!.
More bread rising this afternoon. Sourdough waffles for dinner to kick off lent. No one wanted them for Fat Tuesday...so we will qualify this as meatless...and take this approach.
We are off to Hampshire (Amherst MA) from March 4-7 for Kitty to have a sleepover and chance to get a full measure of the whole college thing. We will probably talk to the financial aid people and have a chance to visit a bakery that has been used as an example by my agriculture friend that I would like to see.
More later.