Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Day One Hundred Eight, April 19th



Memories of Emma



2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Karen your work is beautiful. Some of it very distant and haunting or somber. Is all your work digital? For me to get started in digital, what do I need? I see your posts on Claudines site. Thanks Lynnette April.

Karen said...

Thank you very much for your kind praise.

To start out you need:

1. A reasonably good graphics program - Photoshop Elements is a good start unless you have something better. Also, get a good book that teaches the artistic features of the product. I have a bunch of programs because I do website work as well. I also use Painter IX a lot. It really is an artist based graphics program, you can paint just like you would with a real paintbrush. For all of these programs I suggest a graphics tablet, I have a Wacom Graphire. The set includes a mouse for almost everything and a pen for drawing. For fine editing or drawing it is a must and much more intuitive than using a mouse.

2. A scanner. I happen to have 2, an Epson CX6600 all in one printer that includes a scanner and an HP flatbed where I can also scan slides.

2. Tons of digital images. Sources:
• You can make your own by scanning your old photos
• Subscribe to a Clipart service, I use 2 the biggest is http://www.clipart.com and the other is http://www.dreamstime.com . Clipart.com is a site where you subscribe for a set period of time and can download anything. They have fonts as well. On Dreamstime , you buy credits which decrease as you download.
• Be careful about copyright issues; don’t scan magazine images and stuff.
• I buy lots of ephemera on ebay, old letters, old photos, old forms and documents which I also scan.

Good luck let me know if I missed anything.