Dolly Dress Excitement!

So excited!! Today my Mom bought me an early Valentine's Day present and I can't wait till it gets here! I had been drooling over this dress since they first posted the preview of it on the Bluebird Vintage blog and I'm stoked that I got it before anyone else snatched it up. Hooray for cute little vintage dolly dresses. =) Thanks Mom!!

Here's the dress:

If you haven't checked out the Bluebird Vintage website you must go if you are a girl and love adorable vintage clothes. They have the most adorable finds on there and their blog is great too!

I will make sure to take lots of pictures when it gets here.

Oh and I took another image for the fairytale shadow series:



Happy Monday everyone!!

New Bachelor on tonight!! Boo that Gossip Girl is a rerun though!

Application Anxiety.

14 days and counting till the application for grad school is due and I have nowhere near 15 images for the portfolio. Ugh.

On top of that I can't decide a theme. I started working on the balloon series but the images just aren't turning out how I envisioned. You can see the images so far and read about the idea here. With time running out I am doubtful that this series will come together. I would like to keep going with it but perhaps after the application is turned in and I have a bit more time to do it right.

I have pretty much jumped ship, at least for now, on that idea and started a series based on fairy tales, big shocker there I know. Your portfolio should showcase your thoughts, interests and style as an artist and shed some light on possible future work right? And since one of my ideas for a grad school series revolves around fairy tales, in a different way but yes I know.. again, I think it may be a good idea to have the work I apply with deal with this theme.

One thing I will say is I am not sure how "fine art" the work is. I mean it is conceptual but it seems that everything I do is still considered more on the commercial side. This is not a good thing since grad schools are very focused on fine art work.

Here's the first three images I have done for this series (click on the images for a description of the series). What do you guys think? Too commercial? Not good enough to get me accepted??

Wingardium Leviosa: How to Make Yourself Levitate

As promised I am going to quickly explain how I created the above shot for those of you who asked. This won't be a step-by-step description of what to do in Photoshop just a brief explanation of the set-up as typing all that out would make me crazy.

So, it is pretty simple, providing you have fairly strong abs and are good at Photoshop.

I started out by taking a picture of the setting without me or the ladder and stool in the image. Then I placed the ladder and stool down to where the ladder would support my feet and the stool my shoulders/upper back. I set the self-timer and shuffled quickly into the frame and laid down as displayed in the lower image, trying to keep the balloons in the right placement and making sure to keep as much of my arms and feet showing as possible (creating a foot or an arm is tedious in Photoshop so don't do that to yourself).


Then I just took the above image and the one of the setting without me, the ladder and stool and opened them in Photoshop. I copied the above image and pasted it as a separate layer on top of the image of the room. Then I put a layer mask on the top image (with me in it) and just began to mask out the ladder and stool.

Note: it is important that you use a tripod and keep the same perspective, exposure, etc. for the two images. I moved it just a bit and it took forever to correct so save yourself the time and make sure to do this in camera.

Once you mask out the ladder and stool (or whatever you lay on) it will appear as if you're floating. Just do whatever final touch-ups are needed and there you have it. Easy peasy lemon squeasy. You can now defy gravity. Enjoy!

Lions and Tigers and Bears... OH MY!

My wonderful and amazing boyfriend decided to make me an incredibly happy girl two Saturdays ago (the 3rd) and take me to the San Francisco Zoo. I had been wanting to do something just the two of us for a while and this was the perfect little outing. We had such a fun time! I love this boy SO much! I am a very lucky girl!

I used just my point and shoot for the first time ever really for the pictures of us. I didn't really have any pictures of us so I'm glad I got a couple to put in the awesome digital frame he got me for Christmas =).

Silly faces at the zoo.

Please excuse the lovey dovey-ness.


The rainbow was caused by one of the zoo people spraying a hose to fend off the seagulls.

Such a pretty tiger.


The lion den. I thought it was pretty.

These tigers were only 9 months old. The one on the right was little instigator.

That's Otter the Seal. My boyfriend decided to name all of the animals at the zoo the name of a different animal. He's pretty cute =).

I love peacock colors. I just bought a bunch of fake peacock feathers for an image I've been meaning to do.

Flamingos! I love pink!

This giraffe doesn't have a name but he is friends with Ostrich the Giraffe who my boyfriend and I grew very fond of.

There were just some pretty sun rays on the way out.

Meet the newest addition to our little family that my boyfriend bought me. His name is Ostrich after the giraffe at the zoo. I love him! He sleeps with us every night =).

Shot out the window as we were leaving. Nothing too exciting but it ended one of the best days ever!! =)

Kitchen: Before and After

While my mom was in Tokyo for New Years I decided, as a little belated extra Christmas present to her, to paint the cabinets and clean the kitchen. The kitchen had become quite the disaster area recently. We never use it so it never really gets cleaned but on the flip side we never want to use because it's a mess so I decided to solve that problem.

Here are a few before and after pictures to give an idea of what I did. Also, I did this all in just a few days. Props to myself. haha. I also manually, with just sandpaper, sanded all the cabinets. Ridiculous!

Before (if that's not obvious):
and After:

(Please excuse the one painted cabinet in the before shot. I tested the color before i took the picture)

The trim on the cabinets was such a pain. It took forever but I think it looks better with it.



Obviously I'm not a professional so keep that in mind but I think it looks a lot better. I still have a lot more projects around the house that I still need to do but those are going to take a backseat to my grad school application and portfolio for the next month.

Note to others: you should probably double check deadlines when it comes to something this important. You see I did not do this and now I'm now in sort of a pickle (and yes it's kosher). I had thought I had until May... yes May... 4 months away May.. to get all this done. I found out the other day though that I have until February 6th. That's right, less than one month to create a portfolio of 15 images that are good enough to hopefully get me into a very competitive program.

15 images!!!! Maybe that sounds like nothing to some of you but that is a lot for only a month when each one has to be thought-provoking, conceptual, well-composed, unique, better than almost everyone else who is applying, etc. Oh and they have to be cohesive/thematically linked. So no pulling from my old work. Ahh.. the pressure!!

This does force me to pick my camera up again. I only hope I can make it in time and that the work is something I can at least be somewhat proud to submit. Wish me luck!!