Working through Jessica Sprague and Heidi Swapp’s Mouse Paper Scissors Give course materials yesterday, I decided to swerve off the given path and, instead of using the digital files provided, I’d create something about my grandparents.
Though I wouldn’t say the finished project is really to my taste, I will certainly use the ideas and techniques involved over and again – the Photoshop processes alone are worth the cost of the class, so useful are they.
I’m lucky to have a bit of ephemera from my grandparents’ lives: their wedding certificate, Grandad’s war record and Nan’s school report from 1912 (“She is clean and tidy, polite and well-behaved and very clever with her needle. She is a big, fine girl, capable of doing much hard work and very willing” – destined for “service”, most surely, though that was not to be). I used scans of those documents in the collaged background and then build the film strip from photographs of them both.
I really loved making the flowers, risking life and limb as I played with fire! Definitely something to do more of, though sadly, not at all the kind of thing to teach in a class.
It’s very nearly finished, then. I just need to sort something out for the lower left hand corner as an alternative to the bird motif supplied. I shall see what I can come up with.
