Our smiling faces

Here we all are in Ros's garden. It was the first time we had all been together for some time, so we grabbed the photo opportunity at today's meeting.

From L to R Jenny, Hilary, Lesley, Ros, Pat, Liz and Erica

An Exciting Announcement!

We’ve been very quiet for quite a while now but for good reason - read on…..

We have some exciting news for you – we are holding an exhibition of our work later this year. It will be at the Millgate Museum, Newark, Nottinghamshire from October 9^th –November 29^th and entitled “Consequences”

Whilst visiting the museum to see the space for our exhibition, we decided that we should have a round of Consequences based on a photo taken at Millgate. As it was Lesley’s turn, she chose a photo she had taken of one of the displays – a mangle. On our Picasa Web Album, you can see “All 49” of the images from us which have all been taken from the photo of the mangle. You can also see how we have arrived at each of the images.

Much of the textile based work in the exhibition stems from computer images generated in our Consequences games we have played during the last 2 years. Other work being exhibited has been produced as a “consequence” of using a computer as a tool somewhere in the design process. There will be a very varied display, not only of our finished pieces, but also background information explaining how computers can be used effectively.

More information coming soon….

CTDG Blog

Did you know that the CTDG (Computer Textile Design Group) has now started up a blog? It is early days yet, but I think it is an excellent idea and a great way to be more interactive with members. I hope that we will see lots of wonderful images appearing on the blog, links to other people who share our interest in using the computer as a design tool for their textile work, and generally loads of interesting stuff.

However, it is really very new, and there is only a little bit up on the blog so far, so what we need to do is visit the blog, make comments, suggest links / content etc and see whether we can help get it up and running and full of intersting things.

Over to you!

Frosty Consequences - The Full Story

We have finally got our act together and gathered all the images from our most recent game of Consequences here on the blog, and in our Picasa Web Album
For those that do not already know, we all started off with the same picture (chosen this time by Pat), and we each did a manipulation on it and passed it on to the next person. They then performed their magic on the image and passed it on again. So it went on until everyone had worked on everyone elses images.

The aim of the game was to get everyone exploring their own software on a regular basis, and therefore grow in understanding and confidence with their package. This helps us all to more effectively use the computer as a design tool, but it also gets everyone contributing to the group, regardless of level of expertise. It was NOT a specific aim of the game to produce beautiful designs ready for textiles at any stage of the process, but we all found ourselves delighted by some of the images. Individually we might well use some of them to develop further for our own textile work, however we each choose to express it.

If you want a more complete explanation please see some of the earlier posts, or check out the April issue of DesignIT, the magazine of the Computer Textile Design Group (CTDG)

The slide shows below give you a flavour of what we have been up to, but the best way to understand the transformations is to visit our Web Albums and click on any image to enlarge it.

Pat's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages




Erica's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages



Lesley's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages




Liz's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages




Jenny's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages




Ros's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages






Hilary's Frosty Story

View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages

Frosty Consequences

Pat supplied this lovely image for us.

Our latest round of Consequences whizzed round the group without a hitch. There were some lovely images created, and some of us had trouble working out what to do with them as we liked them just the way they were. But that is not the name of the game, so we carried on making our changes and passing the images along. Once again it was amusing to see how often we almost reversed a transformation done by the previous person, without of course knowing that we were doing so. Pat had suggested that we retain the "frostiness" in our manipulations. This was very hard to achieve, particularly as we got further in to the game. Occasionally we threw the frostiness out of the window in favour of something summery or just plain lovely, but distinctly warm. At other times we managed to drag back a bit of winteriness, whether that was frosty or not is open to interpretation!

As we have 2 new members to the group (Welcome Jenny and Lesley), we decided it would be too time consuming to replicate everything on the computer so we worked through the A4 sheets without the aid of the computer, but we made notes of things people were unclear about or wanted to see demonstrated. After all the images had been considered and we had our long list of things to explore, the computer was turned on and we demonstrated (fumbled and bumbled) our way through the queries so that everyone was clear (!) about how things had been achieved. This was a much more efficient way of working, and concentrated the mind and exercised the brain cells all afternoon.

Rather than posting everything to the blog this time, we thought that we would upload the images to Picasa Web Albums and everyone can see in more detail the progression of each image. There are currently 3 peoples work to link to, but hopefully we will have every one's up and running very soon.

Go check out Erica's transformations: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/EricaMThomson/DotFrostA4Sheets#



Ros's Transformations: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/roswillis58/FrostConsequences?authkey=Gv1sRgCNHQ5JCzm6j_ggE&feat=email#



Liz's Transformations: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/lizziewelch01/DOTConsequencesFrosty#

When everyone has posted their images we will need to gather them together into the right "stories", but in the mean time you can follow each story by looking at the Web albums in the following order: Pat, Erica, Lesley, Liz, Jenny, Ros, Hilary. Start with one persons image (eg Frosty_Liz) and move to Jenny's web album (when it is up) and find Frosty_Liz_Jenny, then to Ros's web album and find Frosty_Liz_Jenny_Ros, and so on. If you do this for all 7 starting images, you can see that there are 49 A4 sheets with iterations on, and that is a lot of information - too much to put up on the blog in full.

The image below is the final iteration of my starting image, and as you can see, there is nothing recognisable left of the starting image, but having been transformed into bright colours at one stage of the game, it was dragged back into the appropriate winter season to finish up as a snowflake - most appropriate.

The story of my shell image is in the picture below. I used the magic wand to select some of the shells, and then turned them a bit pink. Erica tidied them up and made some more of them. Pat went wild and funky and Hilary obviously did not want so much green! She introduced a ripply filter which Ros then dribbled down the page and Chrissie made it into a mosaic. We all had fun, and everyone learn't a little bit more about their programmes. Slowly, slowly, we are all feeling a bit more in control; well, at least I think we are!

Hilary's Shell Image

This is my shell image as it travelled around the group. Ros built on what I had done but then it took some surprising twists. Like the others there is not much 'shelliness' left, but I love the colours of the last piece.
Hilary

Pat's Shell Image

The journey of my shell image took some surprising turns. I love the way Hilary developed my first work on the image, this was then built on by Ros. After Ros the image became a bit of a mystery until it was brought back to 'shells' by Liz in an extremely ghostly manner. Erica then strengthened the 'shelliness' - lovely image, but it does rather look like a plate of tasty mussels !
Pat

Shelliness

As everyone soon realised retaining the 'shelliness'

became more difficult as we passed the images on.

If you haven't already done so I would be interested to

receive your A4 write ups of how you achieved each image.

I like the transition of my shell and the final image which

reminds me of a flower. Well done everyone.

Erica's Shell Image

Here is the story of my Shell image as it travelled round our group. Some of the images are very watery and Liz's transformation reminds me of ocean waves.
Erica

A New Game of Consequences - Shells

This time it was Liz's turn to choose an image for our next game. At the beginning of September, Liz selected this photograph and this time there was a little extra challenge - the idea was to try to retain some of the "shelliness" during our transformations.
We are all learning so much about our computer programmes and we really feel we are making rapid progress. So for the last 3 months we have been working on "Shells". As each of us assembles a page of our own "shells" picture as it was worked on in turn by all of us, it will appear here on the blog

Hilary's Temple

The original Temple photo was one I took on holiday in Kyoto a few years ago.

It has been great fun to see what can happen to this photo as it travels around the group of six for transformation, and quite amazing when all the sets of consequences are put together as on the Blog. Thank you everyone.

Hilary

My First Try at Blogging

With the able help of my son I am now going to try and write my first blog.

This is not about 'Consequences' although I am very much enjoying the experience.

I thought I would share with you some of my present work - I am involved with "Kickstart" and the subject we are exploring is Canals.

I am going to try and include an image from my preparatory work. Wish me luck - here goes -

Erica's Temple

This is the story of my Temple picture as it travelled round the group. The actual temple image is mostly absent but does reappear amid the swirls in the last image.
Erica

Pat's Temple

As a comparative newcomer to DOT, my contributions to "Consequences" take the form of "What happens if."

However, by remembering to take notes on what I do, and believe me, this is a skill in itself, the temptation being to just hit buttons and see what happens. Anyway, now that I have started to discipline myself, slow down and think about what I am doing, I now realise that I am learning so much.

The three monthly meetings help us all to explore not only our own work but that of the rest of the group.

"Consequences" has been good fun as well as providing me with a steep learning curve.

Hopefully, the curve will begin to flatten out over time.
Pat

The Consequences of Experimentation

Having concluded another round of Consequences we are beginning to upload the images that tell the story of the Temple picture that Hilary provided for us to play with.

As before with Cactus Consequences, we each started off with the same image (this time the temple above), and made some adjustments before passing it on to the next person in the group.

No one knew exactly how the image that they then received had been manipulated, all they could do was set to work on the received image before passing it on again.

We each kept a record of what we had done to every image we received and passed on. Then at our meeting in August at Pat's house we produced our A4 record sheets and worked through an image from the original through all of it's iterations to it's conclusion. Using a laptop and Photoshop Elements 2 to show how each iteration was produced.

This way of working kept us all involved and learning. Everyone picked up new things to try out, but we also learnt that we needed to keep better records of what we did!

Below is the story of my temple image. Pat's final manipulation was quite spectacular.

One of the consequences of this exercise is that for our next round of the game we are going to try and retain the essence of the original image. It is so very easy to allow the software to create wonderful manipulations, but they often move so far away from the original inspiration that we loose control over the design process. So our challenge for the next round is to try to hang on to some morsel of the appeal of the original image and hopefully end up with some images that we might use as inspiration for stitch: whether they are the final images or steps along the way.

Ros's temple

Hi everyone

Welcome to my temple.

I particularly liked the inclusion of text this time.

I had been wondering about using it myself.

Looking forward to seeing the other temples

on the blog in due course.

Ros.

Hilary's Cactus

This is the sequence of Cactus HH around the group. It didn't really change a great deal apart from the colours, as the four cut-and-pasted cacti continued all the way through, although at the end Erica did some fancy work with displacement maps. (Erica has posted this for Hilary)
Hilary

Ros's cactus

Dear Dotties

This is my first post although I've been a member for several years. I welcome you to the 'story' of my cactus. Some transformations are more obvious than others but I am very pleased with the finished result.

Arrived At Last

Rather like announcing your safe arrival on holiday with a postcard home ,this is my safe arrival postcard to fellow members that I have arrived safely back on the DOT scene after an absence of over 3 years due to mental illness of which I am recovering (hopefully).









Slower than I used to be but twice as keen.I am not ashamed of having a mental illness and it is true there is always a way back through the maze




I will now start posting my new work from Consequences to the block .