June 07, 2005
Digital Still Life
The two ceramic pieces in this digital still life are key knick-knacks of mine. On the right is a black typewriter business card holder. It represents the first “keyboard” in my life--the one on which I taught myself to touch type. The broken manual Royal portable belonged to my mother. I whined enough to get her to seek out a typewriter repair place. I was fascinated with the mechanism of the keys striking the platen, how it physically shifted upwards to make upper case letters, and the fact that the ribbon had both black and red ink. The keys tops were flat, and you “threw” the carriage to change lines. There was no number 1, so you had to remember to the use the letter l.
The business card resting in it is for The Quote Maven website which was the website I created in a few years back that began life as a class project for an accelerated webmaster certificate course I took at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The quote on it reads: “All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times, but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The second ceramic piece is a small computer box. I bought it—and its twin sitting on my husband’s desk—in a shop in Galena, Illinois. It was the first present I bought him. Inside I placed a glass candy piece. He was my “computer sweetie” since we met via the Internet on Matchmaker.com.
My husband recently gave me the iRiver on the right—an mp3 player for my daily commute downtown. Back in my walking to work days, I used to make mood mix tapes for my Walkman. I have a huge (now obsolete) record and CD collection.. An mp3 player makes it so easy to change songs at the drop of a mood.
My Wacom tablet is a new addition to my digital tool box. I began drawing as a kid. My mother was an artist. When I expressed the desire to be able to draw realistic people, she began to teach me about drawing the human form with the “muscles and bones” lectures. The first graphics package I used on a computer was Corel Draw, in conjunction with Venture Publisher to create newsletters. I’ve graduated on to Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop.
The cordless phone completes the still life, although I could have easily used the cell phone. Naturally, I started with a snapshot from my digital camera. I did a clone in Painter and then sketched the main items. I used various brushes to bring in some color. I cut the face of the iRiver from the photo. The only splash of color in this gray digital arrangement was the red border on the business card. I brought in some yellow for sunshine. I sketched the items all on a single layer—in retrospect, I might have had more flexibility to rearrange the items.
Posted by lorigrace at June 7, 2005 07:39 PM
Comments
I think this still life is a great idea. I love the typewriter card holder the best it works in so nicely with the other ditital items. Love that you gave an explaination of the items in the still life and also a little about how you did it. It works very well and is a great way to show the IF digital theme. Great job!
Posted by: Jacque Davis at June 8, 2005 12:51 PM