Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Pixel Pixies...

...that's what brilliant fantasy writer Charles de Lint calls them.  And sure enough, they're out to drive me NUTS.  Next they'll be making fairie knots in my hair while I sleep...



 We've been going fishing a lot this summer and fall, and whenever we can in the winter.  They stock trout at Fountain Bluff in Liberty, so of course my husband was trying out his Japanese Tenkara rig and practicing his casting.  AND catching fish...

And I sketch.  Not all that thrilling, there, but good practice...

This is the basic view...and I've painted it 4-5 times now.
I used several different techniques on the journal page above and decided to do some close-ups, so scanned the page and cropped a few, with details.

...and from somewhere, in my computer, words from a long-ago demonstration superimposed themselves on the images.
       
This one...FIT. 

That IS pretty much what I did there...wet in wet, bare tree limbs done with lines scraped in...(the lighter tree shapes were blotted but apparently the Pixel Pixies couldn't find that kind of caption...)

...but as if that wasn't enough...THIS one pretty much fit, too.  "Palette grays" are created when you pick up whatever's on your palette and mix it together to make a neutral tint.  Yep.  Like these...

...and just to prove (okay, to my own satisfaction!) that it WAS the pixies and I'm not just totally batshit crazy and I added text then forgot about it...the one above didn't fit.  It was just wandering around somewhere in the innards of my computer and got slapped into place.  NO salt at all in the sky wash...

So here's the capper.  If I looked in Windows Explorer at the file called My Scans, the above three images with text didn't exist.  If I went in through Picasa's viewer, they did. 

WHAAAT....???

So I did a "save as" in Picasa, named them something diffrent, and there they were, in my scans folder.  In Windows.



Oh yeah, and one of the images I'd planned to use in the Art Tip I was working on today?  The one that was in my file, oh, say, half an hour ago?  Gone.  First it was there, then it was a black square, then...poof!

Oh, and Spell Check has disappeared in Blogger today...

Ya know? 

I'm babbling...

Definitely time to turn the thing over to the pixies and go grab a carrot juice or something...

6 comments:

  1. Amazing story, Cathy!! Very strange occurrences!! Those mischievous pixies...

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  2. Maybe it's that 'cloud' stuff... I don't use the cloud... well I try really hard NOT to use it. When my phone or my computer wants to save something to the cloud I always say NO, and put it on my hard drive. I messed up with a new 'smarter than me' phone and deleted a bunch of my work from blogger, luckily I still have access to the photos on Flickr and Ipernity, but it is just too time consuming to go re-add 4 years worth of daily drawings to blogger.

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  3. That's funny, Kate--though frustrating too! I edit our church newsletter, and one month I emailed the finished file to the secretary to print. The whole thing looked fine on my end, but when she opened the file, there was a random piece of clip art in the middle of one article. Nothing I did would reveal it on my end, and nothing she did would delete it on hers. We never did figure out what was going on. I ended up having to re-key the entire issue in a new document file. Those dang pixies!

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  4. Omigosh, Susan, that would be SO frustrating! I have no idea where Picasa came up with the text...I remember doing them ages ago for some demo or another, but the aren't in my scans by themselves...

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  5. Ah ha! I love love love your new direction(s), and your descriptions of pc woes! Reminds me of one of my blog topics about my Boomer's digital learning curve. Lately I've been restlessly moving from one technique/media to another. I used to avoid learning new art forms. Hhhmmm...

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  6. Funny, isn't it!? And now as of this afternoon, I have a Smart Phone to learn...

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