Scratch Art

DD brought this piece of art work home from school last week. She likes doing scratch art projects like this and over the years she has become much better at them. This one has nice strong lines, with little evidence of any indecision as she scratched the black layer away to create her design.

But on looking more closely, I wondered if her teacher realized the significance of the item to the left of the flowers. I'm pretty sure that if she wore a T-shirt to school that advertised alcohol she would be asked to change, and I'm sure if the teacher had realized what UFO is she might have been asked to alter her design (or sent to the school counselor!) Well, maybe not, but I still thought it was an 'interesting' choice.


UFO - Unfiltered Offering. A Hefeweizen beer from Harpoon Brewery.

Mandalas

I was inspired this afternoon by the beautiful artwork at Chewy's blogsite, "The Back of my Headboard," particularly by the gorgeous mandalas she has created. They are done in Photoshop, which I have used a little but not enough to figure out how to create such images myself. (It's the math of the rotations and flips of the picture that's beyond me to figure out on my own.) I was wondering if she would teach me, or if I could find a class - and then as I went back into her archives I found she had linked to a fantastic tutorial on exactly how to create mandalas. (Although I visit her blog from time to time, it wasn't on my RSS feed - if it was I'd've known about the tutorial a couple of months ago.) Thanks Chewy - and you're on my RSS feed now!

Here's the first mandala I've made, from a photo of a snowy tree in our yard: