The Red Barn in the Woods

This is a barn that I originally took with my iPhone 5 with the camera app Fotor HDR. After transferring to my laptop, I opened it in Photoshop CS6 to resize to 11x14 at 200 dpi. I also do levels and saturation changes at this time.  Then I transferred to Corel Painter X3. I did several painted iterations, an initial paint, a muck-up paint, and an emerge paint. In addition to saving in the native Painter riff files, I also save them as jpegs so that I can work with them in Photoshop. I will typically bring all three iterations into Photoshop each with their own layer and play with blending modes, adjustment layers, color changes etc. in this particular image, I used Melissa  Gallo's canvas texture and masked out any unwanted areas and then added a Photoshop canvas texturizer in the filter gallery.

Paintings of Taylor's Falls, MN

My favorite time of year--NOW! 

Day Trip Down To Winona

The Hubs and I decided to take a day trip last Friday to take in some more fall color and just enjoy the day.  We ran across a curious thing.  It was like a little community of floating houses on the Mississippi River at Winona, called Latch Island.  You can tell that there's been a drought.  Many of the little houses had rain barrels, but they appeared to be empty.  We aren't sure if these are just weekend cabins, or if people stay year round~if so I think it could be really cold.  Anyway, I thought it was strange enough to take some images.

Week 4, Open Studio at Digital Art Academy

This is the 4th and final painting for class at Digital Art Academy.  All painted in Photoshop CS6 with the Art History Brush. Original image taken this past week at Taylors Falls, MN, where we have beautiful fall colors right now!

Week 3, Open Studio at Digital Art Academy

Week 3 at Digital Art Academy taught me how to record my brush strokes in Corel Painter, and how to play them back.  Very fun class.

Have a great day!

Week 2, Open Studio at Digital Art Academy

The second week was a continuation of working in impressionism, again using many textures, overlays and papers.  I had a lot of problems with my program, Corel Painter, in that it kept crashing, so I had to finish in Photoshop.  This painting is from an image of my granddaughter at her birthday party.  Here she is.

Hope you had a great weekend.

Minnehaha Falls

Believe it or not, we have our very own Falls here in Minneapolis.  Here's a few pics from our recent hike from the Falls to the Mississippi and the Lock and Dam.

Boating on the St. Croix River

Here it is half of August gone and I've not posted.  It seems that if I have no pictures to post, I don't bother to blog at all. Probably because I don't have anything to say, but, oh well.

Last weekend we went boating on the St. Croix River--our first time ever. Unlike the Mississippi, the St. Croix is very clean and doesn't seem to have suffered from the same drought conditions that the Mississippi has.  Not sure why, it's just so.  The boats on the St. Croix are yacht like and house boat size.  They park on the along the little islands where their inhabitants play all day.  Here are some photos.  I wanted to try out the oil filter on the new upgrade, Photoshop CS6.  In addition, I used Topaz Simplify and Topaz Adjust.

Paddle Boats getting ready to tour the river.

Big boats!

Wish I lived there!