What I Do

A couple of you have asked me to talk more about my art. As you wish.

Mostly what I do is photomanipulation. What is photomanipulation? It’s when you take elements of different stock photos and combine them to create a new work of art, often using digital painting and texture overlays in the process. I do a fair amount of painting in my pieces. I often paint shadows, highlights, make-up, hair, and a lots of other stuff because I find it gives the finished piece more the look of illustration. In fact, my goal with every piece is to create something that looks like a page out of children’s book, as opposed to what you might think of when you think “photomanipulation.” I want my main stock piece–usually a model–to be unrecognizable when a piece is done.

I like to play with proportions. I love big huge dresses and tiny little hats. I love mounds and mounds of taffeta. I love birds, butterflies, lace, koi, bubbles, apples, pears, antlers, ornate frames and pearls. I love enormous hair that could not exist in the real world (without it being shellacked into place). Here is my latest:

I love the feeling of being enclosed. That’s why you’ll notice that many of my pieces have a frame of one sort or another. It can be a swath of fabric (I love yards and yards of fabric) or an archway or a circle of tree branches.

I like using color palettes that are not monochromatic…but use very few colors to great effect. I think this makes my pieces look more unified and painterly.

I want my pieces to be haunting, whimsical and a little creepy. I want you see them and want to get lost in the worlds I create.

I am a self-taught artist. Now, I teach other people how to do what I do.

My tools of the trade are Adobe Photoshop CS 6 and a Wacom Intuous tablet and pen.

My work has been published in several magazines and I’ve been awarded several “Daily Deviations” by the site that hosts my gallery.

I love what I do, but I’m looking to branch out by doing more digital painting and collage-type stuff. More abstract and graphic design-y-type stuff. If only I could find the time…

UPDATE: Here’s a piece that did not make it into my “Featured” folder. It ended up in Scraps. I don’t know why, but by the time it was done, I was like “meh.”