Earrings and Study in Geometricarama

I've got some new earrings in my shop.  These new wire wrapped dandies above...

And these old wire wrappeds.  They've been listed for a long time but recently expired so I refreshed them with new pictures hoping that would add some interest.  In general blue is probably my least favorite color besides hunter green but when I love a certain blue I really love it.  I love the blue beads on these.

I have a ton of new beads in my supply shop as well, but I am pretty beaded out at the moment so I will save photos of them for my next post and instead share with you a fun thing I did that is very helpful in learning all the controls and possibilities in photoshop through a creative, hands-on, experimental kind of way vs. a tutorial or instructions.  You'd be amazed how using a totally different and abstract subject with a totally different aim like this actually translates over into being able to manipulate jewelry photos better.  If you are a doodler type of person like me, you might find this right up your alley.

I started with a photo I took of some pages of an antique machine shop instructional book.  It's got all kinds of mysterious graphs and nice geometric lines.  You can see a plain page above,  and below, I snapped a photo of pages folded and then with a little strip of paper starts to get some more possibilities for manipulation.  It doesn't really matter so much what you start with though because it's all about manipulating later.  But the more intricate the original photo, the more complex the result will be.

book pages folded

with a line of stars

Here I just cropped, did contrast and filter stuff and mirror imaged it to form a pattern...

This is a mirror image of a cropped portion of the folded pages photo.  Note how the fold when multiplied like this gives a cool dimensional look.

Multiplying the images to form a pattern...I would love this pattern on a skirt in a really small scale.  It would look maybe like a traditional Indian motif but up close look all digital.  I love that.

 Inverted tones--I want to do a whole tarot major arcana with this method.  Reminds me of a tarot card somehow.

 With a diffuse glow and line scribbles.  This is actually only a start but I guess I didn't save the final version, darn it.  There's a really cool effect that happens when you spend about half an hour just scribbling circles with the smallest brush tool over something that has been diffused-glowed.  It starts taking on an organic looking fractal webbing effect.  You can really only see the beginnings of the effect above.  Wish I would have saved that final one.

Another one I would love to have as a textile print.  I'm actually starting to sew and I'm thinking I'm going to use some of these ideas as basis for fabric printing.  I have for so long been very interested in making clothes but strangely not in the actual construction.  My dream is to design them and have them magically appear.  That sounds so stupid.  But I am a little stuck with it all because this is literally the only thing I have ever approached from a creative standpoint that wasn't all about the process of physically making something.

I have a little insight into the issue now as I have been getting some supplies and reading a little to learn.  I have a LOT of psychological baggage around what sewing means.  I have this ridiculous brick wall built up in front of it.  Sewing machines have always been very awkward for me because I often use things in weird ways.  I used to think it had to do with right-handedness/left handedness, but it's beyond that.  It's a backwards/forward kind of thing that is hard to describe.  Just to give an idea--when I first started using a computer mouse, I had to turn it upside down to use it.  It was my instinct to use it in a mirror image way.  So I like machines and tools that are very flexible in the ways they can be used and a sewing machine is very rigid.  The time I'm spending on it now is pretty much to teach my body how to acclimate.

But there's also the memories of going into those horrible spiritless sewing stores as a kid and flipping through those big pattern catalogs filled with awful clothes. Nothing ever looked interesting or beautiful, and there didn't seem to even be anything pretty in the entire store.  Just boring, boring, boring--like a non descript church basement with a dropped ceiling and flourescent lights, a million folding chairs against a wall, faded construction paper cut outs of some bad lesson flapping on the wall.

Clearing the cobwebs is in order.  Or using the cobwebs.  A cobweb skirt, perhaps.