If you’re ever in need of a good texture, you need go no further than the dumpster behind your favorite store.  Today, Draw and I went on a dumpster hunt looking for rust textures and, lo and behold… all of 15 minutes later, pay dirt.

A peek at the fun I have in photoshop using dumpster rust.  This photo is of a charming window at the charming Clergy House in Alfriston.

I shoot in RAW so every photo I take requires some processing in Photoshop - this is the original shot (above), after converting from RAW to psd and processing (exposure, sharpen, crop).

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This is the same photo using an overlay of dumpster.  The actual shot of the dumpster rust looks like this…

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After a bit of processing in Photoshop because this was shot in RAW mode, as well.  Hard to believe that, by using this overlay of rust on the original photo it can achieve that kind of soft vintage look.  Depends on your layer setting - I used soft light.

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Now.  Same original photo but as I was jumping in the car after taking some photos of the dumpster behind Pier One - I happened to look down and saw this…

…which, in and of itself, is rather homely.  But that cracking at the top has some potential.  After a bit of color and exposure tweaks and some cropping, I got this…

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…which has major potential.  I think it looks pretty cool just like that, but I really wanted it for this…

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Voila!  Changing the layer setting on that interesting grunge layer, let’s the even more interesting window peek through.

And this is why I have this intense love affair, bordering on an obsession, with Photoshop.

By the way, if you’re a mixed media artist, these window will be available in a digital collage sheet at my shoppe, PaperWhimsy.  And these texture overlays will be available shortly for purchase for digital artists.  Same place.

Lately, I’ve been drooling over fiber art.  I don’t knit, I don’t crochet but I’ve been dying to add fibers to what little art I actually get around to creating.  So, I went out and purchased a Janome Xpressions.  Well, I didn’t actually "go out" as you all know I wear pajamas 24/7.  I went to my computer, bought it off eBay and then walked to the door and waited for it.

Thank goodness my sister, Laura, came to visit me this weekend because she’s the one who finally took this machine out of the box and got it up and running.  I’d had the thing for a couple months afraid to do anything with it.  I’m much better at learning if someone will learn for me and then teach me.

Once Laura got the thing up and running (the belt wasn’t on so we called a Janome dealer and he told her what to do) we had an immediate need for roving and yarns.  I found a local yarn store that carried roving.  WOW!!  I could have spent several hours and several hundred dollars there.   My sister started panicking (we were going splitsies) so I grudgingly put a bunch of stuff back.

The name of the little shop is Stitchery and Scones.  I wanted to see a "scone" thinking it was some sort of fiber thing that I absolutely needed to have.  But they were scone scones like in the edible kind.  Probably American-style (they were out of them).  English scones are pretty much like Jiffy mix biscuits. 

So we discussed the difference between American scones and British scones while the yarn girl rung up our semi-massive purchase.

Anyway, enough about that - maybe I’ll include a photo of the stuff we bought, later.  For now, though, here’s a peek at a WIP, a very first effort using my new (ish) Xpressions.  If I suddenly become organized, as that’s my New Year’s Resolution for 2008 and it’s just a couple of days away, I’ll post follow-ups to this project.  It really turned out to be the kind of thing that I’d like to finish.