I have really pushed to finish the witch from original gouache rendering to a usable design for Halloween apparel. This was done in Photoshop and layered with painting. Here is the dear with her scaredy-cats and she is telling them they will enjoy the ride.





What little I know, I did with filters after I finished the repainting. I saved the various layers to add the filter to the cats, the pumpkins and for the background.

This afternoon I took a snowman from the CARROTS AND SCARVES collection of my Christmas portfolio and did the same for the snowman image. This image was rendered in acrylics on canvas. I think that I like the stuff after I have reworked the images better than when I did them. Well, that was years ago, anyway.




Here the cleaned up image is and the product below made from this image is Christmas Snowman shoes. There are matching products for this image, also. This will be in SNOWMAN PASTICHE.



Here are the Shoe!

Tags: snowmen, Christmas, products, Halloween, witches,

You must go to my new page on this site. It is called SHOPS. This is the page which I will be able to post all the new work and the new products in a variety of shops which I am opening. Check it out. Now, this blog can be focused on how the designs come about and how they came about. Both past and present of the collections as I edit them and create new products and new work. Soon, perhaps in the spring, I will be able to start my painting once more. The stores will be up and running and I will have the newness of a new year to begin ...

Tags: shops, new web page, my new page

At last a new image completed and already applied to product in the LET IT SNOW STORE. I’m coming. Slowly, perhaps, but still I’m beginning to put it together. An I removed the penguin on the right and made another product image for tote bags and t-shirts. These will also have matching Keds shoes to go with the designs. The shoes,however, will have to wait until I can create some border images to go with the grouping.



This is the image I took the above motifs from. This below image was originally painted in gouache on a 5 x 7 inch @ 150% hotpress watercolor paper. After I removed the elements, I repainted them in Photoshop.

Tags: penguins, penguin for holidays,

I have created new Stores for my Christmas images. The headers are below; however, it is taking me quite a while to edit all the images necessary to put into the shops. I need about 25 images per shop to start with. Having the images is not the problem. Editing and preparing the images for other products takes a bit of time. I am a learner on Photoshop and I don’t know the shortcuts or the ‘proper’ way to do the work necessary. So as I have said before I am doing what comes naturally — look, see, render! Well, I don’t know another way so its stand up and do that or do nothing

.

This shop will contain the images from that collection. Those are of penguins, polar bears, pandas and all their friends, of course.



In this shop I will put all the Santa images. There are a number of different kinds of Santas, from Victorian to Elf Santas. They are rendered in different ways and it creates a different feel for the various images.



Now, THE SEASON is for religious images and I have some angels which will go into this shop.



This shop will contain the images which start in fall and go into winter and Christmas with a rustic, country flavor. So Thanksgiving will go into this shop as well as some winter cabins and rustic Christmas.

In order for the images to reach these shops, I must redo them completely in Photoshop by resizing, repainting and in most cases building a stronger base beneath the watercolored base so that the new adjusted motif can be used on larger products than cards and can be successful as a t-shirt image. Here is an example of what will go in the shops. This example is of Penguins and it will, of course, go in the LET IT SHOW shop. No, these shops are not full nor are they ready to be seen. This job of mine takes quite a bit of time and a lot of thought. So here it is.




This is the card. And below is the image for t-shirts, tote bags and other things. Oh yes, there will be matching shoe but that is also another exercise.

Tags: shop header, new headers, penguins

NEW EYES is what I need to accomplish the things I have set out to do. Yes, NEW EYES. This Saturday morning while I listened to Charlie Rose’s interview with Peter Gelb, and Penny Woolcock I realized that what they were saying about Opera was what I needed to reach me own objectives. Charlie was interviewing them about the celebration of the 125th Anniversary of the Metropolitan Opera. I love to listen to his interviews because as I have said before, the ideas and concepts of the who, what and where, how and why ooze during that hour. This time as he visited about the Met and opera, the concept of NEW EYES fell upon my ears and I realized that NEW EYES was exactly what I needed for my own work.

Opera plays an important roll in my sister’s life and without going into this let me say it was her life and it became a part of all my family’s life. So when hearing this interview I had not only mine in the present hearing but mine from an earlier time in life. Opera was something that came to the world from Italy and it was from and for the people but it grew over time to be thought of as for the upper class or wealthy. Something which was above the common man. Far, far from the origins of the art form.

Peter Gelb, according to TIME, is a revolutionary and visionary in the field of classical music and it is because of his ground-breading initiatives that Charlie’s program and my connection to the depth opera ment to my sister that I could hear something so vital so real so necessary to what I was doing that when I heard it I knew that NEW EYES was necessary for myself.

To keep it alive it needed to bring in new eyes. How I interpreted it for my use is this way. I spent 16 years building and working designs which I either sold the use of or licensed the use of to manufacturers for their products. I spent another 10 years building and creating designs and selling a product and my painted works to retail stores. All of those 26 years were competitive and were not shared intellectually with other artists or inquiring individuals. Now, finding myself in a completely new arena, the on-line print on demand stores of the web, I cling to the learned positions of all those years. The position which knowing and applying was the absolute safeguard of your income, your designs, your tomorrows. The shows or exhibitions were not open to the public. The exhibitors were strictly advised not to enter the booth of another exhibitor without consent or invitation. No cameras. No copying anything in any way. Such was the stuff of lawsuits. I had to enter such a suit more that once to maintain my rights and keep my designs from being used by manufacturers who tried to unlawfully use them without license. Those kind of lessons are not forgotten.

Artists do have eyes. I have eyes and there is nothing new in the art world that has not been seen or done before but it is entirely new based on HOW you see. How you interpret what you see. It is extremely competitive. So I used my eyes as did the others and I interpreted what I saw from my position but I did not copy or in anyway use the explicit design of another artist. Now in this on-line store idea, I have trouble as I discover that the works are touched and used by all other shops. Well, China had eyes on designs when I was licensing. Those eyes took and still take designs from artists. China looks at it as just competitive not theft. Eyes of the beholder.

For my NEW EYES it will be to openly spread my work to all the other shops and allow my designs to flow outward without the fear or anxiety and to try to see how the NEW FORUM really works. I will use my NEW EYES to do what seeing allowed me to accomplish in my 26 years of experience as an active and very successful participant in the marketing of designs to retailers and manufacturers and I must add as a painter in the preceding years. So today forward NEW EYES will look at the on-line print on demand stores of the web.

Trying to build up the images that are needed in the various store and still remain with your eyes open is a real task. However, I am making progress and enjoy the feeling of having moved one more image forward from their storage to an active place in the Zazzle or CafePress stores that I am opening.

The big challenge at the moment and an ongoing important part of all this is to learn how to interact with the other people and to connect all the images with as many places as possible. This is so foreign to me and so blank in my mind that constant investigating is required. As I spend all day editing and repainting the images in Photoshop so that they will be usable on products for things other than what they were originally built for, the time required to learn how to ‘network’ and ‘wire’ all of this seems to drift further and further away. Nonetheless, I will reach the objective.



This witch and her cats has to be removed and then reworked to go on products about 200% larger. Here is the result and this is now in product in the OCTOBER 31 shop. Actually, if I can keep the pace up and LEARN how to do all of this, in 12 months this will be a truly large site and exceptionally large shops with an amazing number of images on a rotating basis.




The recent image that I enjoyed so much is this little Santa elf image. So from card to t-shirt and tote, here he is:




This is the larger, reworked image as an image for a tote. He is the same on a t-shirt but without the border effects. This will be in the new shop which I hope to open on September 22.

Tags: Halloween Christmas Santa elfs, witch "scaredy cats"

This Monday was sicking. The stock market continues to go down and my personal well being is being greatly diminished. This is even more reason to push forward with my work. I have not learned how to successfully blog and cannot even see who could give a care; however, everything I read and all the print on demand companies stress the need to blog the things you would want to sell.

I am focusing now on Christmas as it is the time of year that business make from 60% to 80% of their entire year’s profit. It was that way with my licensing also. I made more from Christmas images by Mary Parker than all the other stuff. Too, the gas prices are bursting the top out of everyone’s finances, so it is likely that more people will stay home and perhaps, just maybe, they will shop the internet. I do regularly. But then when you find yourself on the side of a mountain you tend to do that if you want to have anything. So high hopes.










These are three new works which I edited today from cards images. I removed the angels from the card and cleaned them in MaskPro and then repainted them in Photoshop CS3. That was for both of the angel images. The motifs are them used alone for t-shirts and as shown above as images which can be used on tote bag and other products. The Santa was a simpler job. I just reduced him and cloned the sides in to reshape the size. It did take all day.

Now here is a situation. When I was licensing my work, it was not considered good taste to put angel motifs on rugs because you walked on them. I will be building Christmas shoes and I don’t think I will put angels or religious icons on the shoes. Putting them on t-shirts is much different. When in doubt — don’t. So I won’t.

Tags: Christmas work "angels on shoes", "Stock market plunge"

I record CHARLIE ROSE on PBS and listen in the mornings before work or starting the day. He has an inquiring and open format that allows reason to open out and through his questioning unexplored insight becomes my thought for the day. This morning I listened to Charlie opening conversations with Johathan Alter, Bob Schieffer and Paul Begala. Although they spoke on things entirely different from the underlying thoughts of my own, I listened as they opened their views on the campaign for President.

One should know that I have a very deep habit of listening to the ideas and opinions of others, particularly those whose ideas and opinions have accomplished something of merit in our society, and retranslating it or adapting the ideas to fit my objectives. So when hearing this morning the insights they shared individually and collectively about the personalities running for office of President, I observed that there was something in those view points which I might be able to use to shed light on the problems I am having in finding my way back to painting and living a productive life. The larger the personality the easier it is to observe the traits or ideas and the larger the accomplishments the easier it is to identify the components.

I am trying to use the designs I built for 16 years. I am trying to apply my mind to understanding how I might do that and return to the creative act of painting. While opening the portfolio, I re-discovered that the designs were built for products; therefore, they could be used on print on demand products with little or no problem. They were not sacred. Never were and that was a motto that I used many times over the years as I built the collections. The position I am in today is very different from the position I was in when I built the collections. So what was it I was doing and how did I use what ever it was to build the work. What happened to stop the work. What and why I am trying to do today with those same images? So when I heard them, the men above on Charlie Rose, say that Obama had recently focused on Obama rather than what it was that Obama was going to do, my mind grabbed the thought. I have been focusing on my own pain and not on what or how I am going to use it to produce.

‘Round the horn? Maybe. But that is the thought that opened my mind this morning and that is the place where I need to center my direction. It changes nothing regarding my emotions but it does help in removing the cart from in front of the horse. When I painted and sold eggs to retailers, how did I do that? I painted thousands of eggs every year for 10 years. How did I do that? When I painted images for manufacturers and built collections and presented them successfully every year for 16 years in New York at the SURTEX show, how did I do that? When I packed everything up and closed everything down and moved to the mountains, how did I do that? When I arrived at the cabin in the woods, how did I put it all together? Well, I realized this morning that I needed to modify my thoughts a bit. I was thinking too much about my ‘self’. Perhaps, if I changed that just a little I might be able to find the focus that I have previously used to build.

That is I used my mania to build. I used my will to stay in the kitchen when it was hot - real hot. I would play Offenbach’s prelude ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD until I was exhausted. I would use it to feel and then stop, dead in my tracks, return to the calm focus of the work at hand. I did this with Mozart. I did this with Charlie Daniels Band, Redneck Fiddlin’ Man. I would play the Tractors (their country rock) until the sound vanished and the mania was exhausted. But at the same time I was playing these CDs, I was painting and building images with speed. I would paint as many as five designs at once. Five-up I would call it. So that is some of what and how I worked my mania as a tool. But to do it over and over for 26 years and each time it was like new, how did I do that?

My mania rapid cycles. A lot of hilly roads. But underlying a continuing build ascending upward in the fall of the year and blessedly arriving a the fall equinox where all was perfect if only for a while. This is my time for building, for creating and for an iron will to be applied to clear objectives. I would fly across the sky like a Phoenix right into the eye of the sun and fall every evening into my ashes only to rise the next morning and do it over and over and over. I would not trade that for any part of a smooth even playing field.

So here I am. In a log cabin, in the Smoky Mountains, with large portfolio of product oriented art work... I was derailed by the villain CANCER which attacked my husband, my friend, my companion, my partner in life. It took me from 2002 until the summer of 2005 when I packed up and headed for the mountains, for my production to suffocate. And for it to suffocate completely, it wasn’t until the summer of 2007 when I got a grip of the hole I found myself in, that I started to rebuild a new phase. So I am through bleeding all over myself. It is not about the pain or the problems, or all the fine yesterdays. It is all about how I take what I have and what I am and rebuild it all. A little different perspective but that difference makes a monstrous difference in accomplishing the objective.

OBJECTIVE: Regain dominance over my plight. Make the existing images work. Paint.
TOOLS: God given talent. Mania. Will power and focus. A brain. Ability to stay in the kitchen when it is hot.

Tags: "will power" direction "artistic creations" mania

This effort to open my entire portfolio and edit the images for on-line store is an extremely hard task for me to grapple with in my mind. I am an artist with a personality disorder and I maintain control over it with self imposed isolation, fish oil and folate, strict sleeping habits and routine. I have trouble with depression and mania. I built THE EDITH COLLECTION portfolio by obsessively working day in and day out and it worked. I could ride the storms out. I lived for the presentation at the SURTEX show in New York each year. I presented my portfolio there every year for 16 years. When you went there your ideas, your work, designs, contacts - they were all confidential. No artist was allowed in the booth of another without express permission. No cameras. All my work was kept from the public for 16 years. The show grew and grew and grew. It was alive with artistic expression and creativity. Alive with excitement. Alive with the anticipation of licensing your creations to a manufacturer. The artists there came from all over the world not just the US but from all over the world. Every year new artists came and every year artists vanished from the scene. I loved it. It was like blood in my veins.

Now, I am trying to take all the hundreds of images and open them out into print on demand shops. The shops are like massive groups of social bees incestuously visiting and touching the images and using them to reach their own opportunities. It is so opposite. It is so unreal and yet I feel compelled to take this portfolio which made me a fine living and open it like a thief trying to sell the images on the street corner. My psyche hurts inside as I do this. WHY? ...and my images, well, they are not sacred or they would be in some church. They’re not. They are in a storage unit just sitting.

Well, for what it is worth in 2002 my husband and business partner got colon cancer. It was in a lymph node. He underwent major surgery. It was not good. But he, unusual man that he is, would not recognize that position and as we journeyed each day to chemo we continued with our business. He managing and I painting and never stopping, we continued right on through the 2003 SURTEX and right on to the next major surgery. It was in his liver. He underwent another major operation and I made deals in the hospital parking lot. Neither of us stopped. We went right on to the 2004 SURTEX and the next major surgery. That was by pass heart surgery for 5 major arteries. We both continued to work through all of this.

You see there was a lot of mania and a lot of roller coaster emotions for me and try as I did. I could not keep my head above the ‘water’. I packed up every thing, gave away truck loads of manufacturers samples to people and to Goodwill. Then I sold everything I would not need and we moved to the Smoky Mountains. I have skipped over this fairly smoothly. My dear strong willed husband weathered it all and came through it all successfully and with his life even as I speak. But for me, well, I had an episode.

We used to wonder just what my capacity was. That was it. I was unable to go to SURTEX in 2006 and 2007 and just like if you put your hand in a bucket of water and removed it, that was the way it was when I was unable to attend. Since then it has been like trying to breathe in quicksand.

I am trying to find my way back to painting. Painting everyday but painting with a different mind. Painting as I used to paint when I painted my emotions. I still hunger and thrust after the excitement and the forum, the opportunities, the exhibition.

Tags: "why on-line shops" painting , Maina depression episode

Today I worked on creating a new Halloween card and t-shirt from an image which was square. This had to be done by first removing the border and resizing it to fit the card size. The original size was 8x8 inches. The new card image size is 7.5x10.5inches. This is a regular 5x7 @150%. I selected the border and drug it to the new base in Photoshop. There I used a free transform to create the new border.


This is the new border:


The subject was removed and ‘repainted’ in Photoshop to change to painted feel of gouache to a stronger feel and when it was resized using ALIEN SKIN BLOW UP it would look good as a 14 x 12 inch t-shirt image. The background was filled in and painted to be able to receive the removed image in this more narrow format.


The obvious areas were smoothed out and blended placed under the frame and the removed image on top. Then some repainting on multiple layers to return the feel of the original painting.




Last put the subject image through ALIEN SKIN BLOW UP and there is my new t-shirt image.



I have shown it here on black. This is actually a transparent image background and will be used on dark fabric.
This may not be the right way to create the products which I needed; however, I did it this way until I learn a better path. That I hope to do soon with LYNDA.com

Tags: Halloween "resizeing image"

I worked with manic speed and focus yesterday. Made some very important errors. I forgot to tag my blog and put the permalink in place. Today I had to drive 70 miles to the Mac Store to renew my ONE on ONE. That’s worth it. It’s my roller-coaster emotions that stress me out. Trying to make my portfolio work. Well, what I mean is that I built one really great portfolio of images which I used to license to manufacturers and I cannot just walk away from it and let it perish in the dust. That is what I am trying to do. Breathe life back into my work. Oh, the work was good. That was not the problem. I just bottomed out emotionally because of, well a lot of things. Anyway back to the images. I built another on-line shop.

I am taking 100 Christmas images. Cleaning and editing them for use as cards for the Holiday Season. That should be of interest to people who do shop on line. But they have to ‘see me’ to buy the cards. That is what I am learning all of this for and with the hope that once the images in the overall portfolio are placed productively into shops, I will be able to return to my painting. Painting is the objective. That is the place where I am trying to reach. So until that moment, check out the Christmas Cards and see what I am talking about. I have about 29 in place at the moment and will reach that 100 mark by the end of September.


make custom gifts at Zazzle

Tags: "Christmas cards" "Christmas images"

This has been a test to determination. I have managed to find my way through the maze of placing the CHRISTMAS PIZZAZZ blog, which is the blog for the images in the MARY PARKER CHRISTMAS PORTFOLIO, on a domain page with Blogger. Great. Today I have created another shop CHRISTMAS CARDS which will eventually hold several hundred Christmas designs. The images will reflect a great deal of difference in style and rendering and will be nothing but cards and postage stamps.

I have been editing and cleaning up the images and preparing them to open this shop. The first round of cards will be 50 images by the end of this week and in different categories. This use of Photoshop even if it is very basic for me is very helpful. I was able to use a couple of filters today as I put borders and trim around the edges. I know that I will be back with my lessons at LYNDA.com before very long. I am very excited about the way in which those lessons are explained and that I can use the information instantly with work on these images.

This is the banner for the CHRISTMAS CARD SHOP:



This is great to have hundreds of images; however, they don’t just spring out there automatically. I sit here while my bones disolve -- I’m sure. Every moment of this puts me closer to where I so desperately want to be and that is painting. Painting once more. All I know about sanity.

Tags: images "Christmas Cards" "Zazzle shops"

The MARY PARKER CHRISTMAS PORTFOLIO has a blog on Blogger. That blog is called CHRISTMAS PIZZAZZ. I talk about the collection of images that I have in that portfolio and describe my editing process and what I am doing to evolve the work. Today I have anchored that blog with Google and created a web page which will help to strengthen my visibility on the web--or at least that is part of the theory.

I am thrilled with RapidWeaver. It is a most wonderful thing which has created for me the very base of what I am building and will continue to be the place upon which I put together all of the work in THE EDITH COLLECTION. Each movement forward brings me closer to the window I will build to be able to paint. Painting once more in a ‘fine arts’ fashion. That will become my main purpose, daily paintings with daily posting of new work. It is just a great feeling to put another brick in place.

I hope to be able to put the galleries to the Christmas and to the Halloween on this site by January ’09. I will have ordered them as I go through the images building new products and creating new art work with the editing processes. That is one of the objectives for this site.

Well,here is the new base for the MARY PARKER CHRISTMAS PORTFOLIO.

Tags: "Mary Parker Home" "Christmas collection site" "Google blog base"

I will try it this way. I hope it works.
Having trouble. Keep fingers crossed.
OK I do not know what is going wrong here but this image no matter where it originates,( psd, jpg,or png) I cannot get it to become visible. I thought it might be the added type but that was flattened. Guess it’s just a Halloween image and there are spooks in my computer. This is just a note to explain the image which would not load.

Tags: pumpkins, Halloween, Jack-o-lantern

This work was accomplished within a morning; however, it could have been much sooner if I didn’t have to learn everything as I go a long. I can tell you that using Photoshop CS3 and using the Intuos 3 Graphics Tablet is like heaven. It does help to press SAVE often. So here are some results for new products:



I put the image on black so that it would appear as it would when applied to a dark or black fabric. I used MaskPro to clean up the image and verify that there was no some “trash” I could not see that would appear when it was applied. I completely reworked the surface with numerous layers trying to maintain the same feel of a painted rendering but strong enough and clean enough to print clearly. The eyes are all re-done and the cat’s whiskers show off great.

UNFORTUNATELY MY IMAGE WILL NOT APPEAR.
I will try to make it on a second publish.


This line of type was done in Photoshop CS3 and that is a great pleasure not to have to go into another program, especially when you are like me and learning. This image is now on a t-shirt in my shop OCTOBER 31. It also made it as a card.

Tags: pumpkins, Halloween, Jack-o-lantern

I am taking images from the Mary Parker Halloween portfolio and creating new images. This image of a scarecrow was originally built to go with images which looked old and faded. I will up-date the elements as I remove them and brighten up the feel.
I have decided to remove the pumpkins and try to make them into a t-shirt . Below are the pumpkins removed and the surface of the pumpkins reworked as well as the pumpkin edges. I will try to add and restructure the grass to add texture and interest. As for the ‘Scaredy Cat’ I think I will give him some new eyes. This work is now in progress and when completed will go into the OCTOBER 31 shop.

Tags: Halloween scarecrow jack-o-lantern