Trying out Tophatter

Imaginary Flora, digital manipulation of old microscope photography

Upon the recommendations of Handmadeology.com, I've decided to try out this live auction site, Tophatter.com, as a venue to sell some of my artwork.  They only allow you to schedule one auction at a time when you are new, so it will be an interesting test to see if anyone is interested in my work.  My first piece up for auction will be a 6" x 8" print of "Imaginary Flora", shown above. It will be appearing in the Weekend Bazaar auction on May 6th at 12PM Pacific Daylight Time (1 PM Mountain Daylight Time, here where I am!). I hope that some of my friends will be able to show up and talk me up!  The starting bid will be only $3 + $2 for shipping! I usually sell this print for $15, so this auction could be a great deal for someone!

New Christmas Card and Cleaning My Desk...

Not sure what the one thing has to do with the other, but they were the two subjects I took pictures of today. For years now I've thought that my electron micrograph (that's a photograph of something taken under an electron microscope) of crystallized stain reminds me of branches and the little globs in some places looked like berries, so I finally turned it into a Christmas card! Here's the original image: The original photograph was created on real film, creating this odd sized negative (something like 4" x 5") which wandered around the country with me for years and years before I finally got around to and found a place that could scan it and produce it in digital form. From the digital image, I was able to use The Gimp to colorize it a nice Christmas-y green, then I picked out some of the little clumps of dark areas and turned them into red berries. After printing it onto high quality photo paper, I mounted the photo onto a 5" x 7" card:

I have listed this item for sale in my Etsy Shop.

I have also been working on several other things today, even though it has been a relatively quiet day. I took a snapshot of my desk, because it was looking decidedly picturesque:

The picture shows the bunch of fall leaves that my friend sent me from Ohio, my Day Planner from an Artful Agenda, my buttercream scented, handmade soy candle in a hand-thrown pot from Mad Hatter Pottery, the return address labels I just got from Animal Humane of New Mexico (They spelled my last name right! I think I'll send them money!), my yummy, warm cup of coffee with sugar-free hazelnut creamer in it, and the drawing I've been working on, entitled "Miasmata." (For anyone too lazy to go to dictionary.com to look it up, miasmata is the plural of miasma, meaning the noxious exhalations from putrescent organic material, or a dangerous, foreboding or deathlike atmosphere.) I thought this photo made a nice little snapshot of my day, plus, I cleaned my studio the other day, so you can actually see the surface of my desk in places, which impressed the hell out of me, if no one else.

Oh yes, I took pictures of one more thing today, the adorable pile of mammals on the bed this morning--Mimi, Cassie and Sean:

My First Fully Digitally Created Collage

Okay, there are too many adverbs in that title, but anyway...

Today I listed a completely digital creation. I created it as several layers in The Gimp. For those of you who have never heard of that, the Gimp is a shareware graphics program built originally in Unix (the name is really an acronym--Gnu Image Manipulation Program), but which has also been made available for Windows. It can do many of the cool things that the pricey Photoshop and others can do, but it is utterly free! All you have to do is figure it out. I have been able to figure out a few cool things with it, though I am not exactly a whiz or anything. I was able to create this nifty new digital collage, colorizing and combining a silverpoint drawing that I had scanned and have since misplaced (yikes!) with the electron micrograph that I had digitally scanned last month (see my post about it). I think it came out pretty well! You may click on the picture to go to my Etsy shop and purchase one for yourself!

Fun with Fifteen Year Old Mistakes Caught on Film

So, as I may have mentioned in my profile, I have a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Wake Forest University. As part of my thesis project, I attempted to visualize my happy little protein of interest, integrin αIIbβ3 (if you must know), all by itself on a film, stained with uranyl acetate (a salt of uranium), by transmission electron microscopy. This particular attempt was early on in the learning process, and wanting to see something right off fairly badly, I loaded it up with a ridiculous amount of stain. So ridiculous an amount, in fact, that the stain crystallized across the membrane, and in places, made really pretty patterns. Having an artist's eye already, I took a picture of it (this was back in the day when you used real film, not digital files), and the nice folks in the EM lab developed it for me, along with the snapshots of my real experiment, and somewhere along the line, I acquired the negative. A large format negative, measuring 3.25" x 4", I managed to keep it in an envelope, stashed away, through a dozen or so changes of address through three different states. During a photography class I took several years ago, I did manage to print out a couple of prints in the University darkroom, but still couldn't do much with it. Finally, inspired by my fellow Etsy sellers who make lovely greeting cards and prints of microscopic photography (please see Etsy sellers ara133photography and EssenceFineArtImages), I found someone who could scan my original slide and put it into digital form so I could play with it. While I have only played with it a small amount in The Gimp, I thought it came out sort of pretty, and made a good excuse to blog today!

I am open to any suggestions my readers might have with how I could utilize this image, perhaps layering it with other things. The image is not for sale anywhere in my Etsy shop yet, as I am still trying to figure out what to do with it.