Monday, September 14, 2009

Playing with my food!


It's a busy time in the garden these days. We have many tomatoes and crookneck squash. The tomatoes were my idea. I love a good homegrown one. They have so much more flavor than store bought. However my husband is not such a tomato fan. He will occasionally eat a slice on a hamburger, but that is about it. Therefore I had way more tomatoes than I could eat so I began making marinara sauce. To begin this process you have to blanch the tomatoes to remove the skins. As I am doing this and tossing the skins into my "garbage bowl" ala Rachel Ray, I notice how vibrant the colors are (one of my plants is a pear tomato which has a bright golden skin when ripe).

This leads me to the "playing" part. I belong to an online yahoo group called "The Latest Trends in Mixed Media Art". Cindy Powell, one of the owners of the group, posted on tutorial on creating digital kaliedoscopes. Well, that got me started and of course when I saw the beautiful colors in my bowl it lead to this:


And this:

And this:


You can see how this could be a wee bit addictive. Kind of like snowflakes--no two come out alike. These were all made from the top photo.

So what does one do with these? Well, my mind has gone on quite a journey answering that question. Some of the ideas are still just ideas, but here are a couple of examples:



I happened to have some Daisey D paper that matched the orange kaliedoscope perfectly. The teal is also from Daisey D. The background paper on the purple card I made on the computer to match the kaliedoscope. Here are some close up photos:


I printed the images 3 times; each time a little smaller. I then cut them out. They are layered together with 2 layers of foam tape for dimension. I made the purple one last and got the idea to cut "petals" on the second layer. I really like this effect. I then added some sparkle (which unfortunately does not show up so well in a photo) with Stickles in a coordinating color.

This was not on the "To Do" list for this weekend, but oh well. :) Sometimes I create my best art when I go with the spontaneous projects.

Thanks for visiting, Denise