Week 27 of 365 Days of Art Challenge

View of dust storm heading our direction (coming

west) Photo taken from backyard. The opaque 

cloud that can be seen over the tree tops and

roofs is the dust storm. The trees and roofs give

an idea of how high the dust cloud is. Blue sky 

can still be seen above this cloud of dust.

It's been a hot muggy week here in AZ. We officially started our monsoon season with a huge dust storm last weekend. Visibility was reduced to 0 in some areas. I went outside to check on the chickens and could see a wall of dust coming our way quickly! By the time I got my husband to help me round up the chickens to enclose for safety, they had already gathered in their nesting box and we were able to just close it. They are smarter than I give them credit for!! The storm hit just then. Hard to see with keeping my head down and eyes covered (still got dust and dirt in them!). Wish we had gotten rain with the storm!

View of dust storm heading our way from front yard (coming up from the south).  The dust storm looks bigger from the front yard. The wind was strong enough to topple huge trees in the neighborhood.  

I played on my tablet this week with two photo-editing apps. One is Pixlr Express, which I use frequently to touch up pictures. This app also allows me to combine photos, add text, texture, stickers, etc. to photos as well. It's fun to experiment with. The above photos of the dust storm are edited in Pixlr Express to help emphasize the dust clouds.  

The other app I enjoy using on my tablet for editing photos is Paper Camera  because of the choice of effects that can be used to make photos look like drawings or paintings. The following photos are ones I edited in Paper Camera. 

My Jack Russell Terrier, Abu, is 15 years old. He loves to sleep on his pillows all day, except to take a walk or to eat people food or a doggie treat! I love the Sketch Up effect in Paper Camera. This photo really looks like a sketch, even though I've not picked up a pencil at all! This is my sketch for this week! Lol!!

With this photo of seed pod on a cactus in our front yard, I used the Neon Cola effect of Paper Camera.

It creates bold outlines of the various colors in the photo and puts them on a dark background. 

Photo of my daughter edited in Paper Camera using the Haystack effect. The Haystack
effect transforms the photo to look like it's been painted using pointillism (tiny dots of color). 

A photo I took in Sedona last fall. I used Paper Camera's Acquarello effect. This

makes the photo look like a watercolor (albeit a paint-by-number watercolor! Lol!).

This is another photo from Sedona. I used Paper Camera's Andy Pop effect to create a tiled
image in the style of Andy Warhol. The number of rows and columns can be changed. 

This is another photo I took in Sedona last fall. This is the Pastel Perfect effect to make the photo look like it's been painted in pastels. I like this effect, but wish it were a bit lighter and brighter. 

This time I used the Gotham Noir effect from Paper Camera with the same photo
as above. Gotham Noir creates rich black and white images of photos. 

I hope you enjoyed the various effects of the Paper Camera app. These are only half the effects available in Paper Camera. There are a several other styles in Paper Camera that I did not show today, like Comic Boom (I believe this is suppose to give a comic book like effect), Old Printer (black and white dots like the old printers use to do), Contours (looks more like a charcoal drawing with outlines), Bleaching (the photos is outlined with the colors faded), Half Ton (similar to the Old Printer but in color), Granny's Paper (sepia toned), and Pen and Paper (photos is done in shades of blue).  I'll create photos using those effects and post them in another blog.

Made it through another week! Keep being creative!!

Sedona, AZ

Traveled to Sedona, AZ to pick up donations for the Arizona Quilter's Guild annual fall meeting. Our chapter, Prickly Piecers, is hosting the meeting this year, along with the members-at-large. One of our jobs is creating raffle baskets to raise money to help pay to bring in national quilt teachers to AZ for workshops for guild members. I had an individual and a couple shops that said they had donations if they could be picked them up. My husband was game, so we made a mini-vacation out of the trip. Sedona is one of the most beautiful places in God's creation. The red rock mountains just glow in the sun. We were treated to a rain storm our first night and got some gorgeous photos with storm clouds against the red rock glowing in the sunshine!  We stayed in Cottonwood, a small town about 15 miles from Sedona. It's not as expensive as Sedona is.

Driving along the road from Cottonwood into Sedona. 

Storm clouds made a beautiful sky.

Heading into Sedona. Photo taken from the side of the road.

Pillar backlit with stormy clouds close to sunset.

Golden sunlight striking the mountains.Taken from a pull off at a trail head 

north of town.

As the sun set, the red rocks just glowed orange as they were hit by the sun.

 It was beautiful to watch  as section after section  of rock formations lit up 

and glowed. What a way to spend the evening.

Closer view of the rock pillars (from photo above), also showing the clouds from

the stormy evening.  I enjoyed the contrast of colors between the yellow, orange,

and red rocks to the dark blues, turquoises, and grays of the sky and clouds. 

Heading back to Cottonwood to our hotel. The sun hit the mountains in the

distance making them glow.