Canvas to the Imagination

This week I’ve been working away at the individual altered books that will be assembled into the installation for the Container Art show. I set a goal to complete ten of these by the end of this week and as of yesterday afternoon I finished number eight. I’m very pleased with how this project is slowly coming together. Once all the books are finished I need to do further planning on how these will be displayed. My idea has evolved a bit since I wrote up the proposal over a month ago.

These details shots feature an oyster shell, a barnacle covered rock, and two dried oyster mushrooms. Everything was collected on my last trip to Bowen Island.

It felt difficult to return to the portraits after a month long break, but I love these shots of Krista and the paper lanterns. They make me happy because they’re so wonderful and colourful.

I decided to experiment with processing the series in different ways and played around with a set of Photoshop actions I found on the internet. I’ve never really used Actions before because they lend themselves more to batch processing and I don’t really do much of that. I still had to do a considerable amount of tweaking.

I added a texture to the final shot I worked on last week. In some ways it suits the photo but I think the texture isn’t subtle enough and distracts from the shot. I may redo this one a bit.

This is the twenty-third portrait in the Imaginary Girl series. My original goal was the create twenty-five of them but I may keep going past that number.

I shot this portrait of Stephanie at the beginning of June and as of the beginning of July it will be in a group show at Gallery Gachet along with the portrait I took of Jess. (How’s that for putting new work to work.) This was taken on Granville Island with the giant leaves of a Gunera plant as the backdrop, and Alice in Wonderland as the inspiration.

June has not been a productive month for working on the portrait series because I’ve had other projects I’ve needed to concentrate on. There are numerous artists calls with summer deadlines coming up and it’ll mean more shows in the future if my work gets accepted. (Fingers crossed!)