Walhalla day trip

Friday was the last day of our (official) holidays, so we decided to take a day trip to Walhalla.

A little bit of history: Walhalla is a bush town built because of a gold rush. It grew from people gold panning to a gold mine being built, and infrastructure to support a growing population. Then there was the BIG fire of 1888, started by a candle, which wiped out nearly every building. There's more in there (you can read everything on history signage around the town), but that's the real basics.
A lot of the buildings have been rebuilt since the fire, and it's now a tourist town, with a few shops, museums, mine tours and the train which runs on certain days across the river to the next town.

I found it amusing that at the beginning of the day I kept thinking how nice it would be to live there. It's a beautiful town in the middle of the Australian bush, but as the day went on, watching all the tourists take photos of every house (which all could be seen from every angle), I wondered how much privacy people who lived there would have. From a business point of view, it would be awesome to make art there, have an open studio, talk to new people every day. But if you were having a bad day, or weren't feeling 100%, I can see how you may not like living somewhere so exposed.

All in all, it's a gorgeous part of the world, and I definitely recommend visiting if you have the chance!

My photos suck

Early last year I went on a few photoshoots during the holidays, but came back discouraged, I felt I didn't get any good photos. And to tell you the truth, I often come back from photoshoots feeling that all my photos suck. Sure some were nice happy shots, but nothing that I feel good enough to show anyone or get printed.

The next couple of days I went through photos I'd taken over the past three years and wondered why some of them I'd kept on my computer eventhough they weren't anything special. It occured to me that maybe there is actually no such thing as a bad photo. To me, most of the photos I had taken were kinda average, nothing that made you stop and want to look at them.

But what if they weren't actually bad. What if they just weren't finished.

So I began experimenting. And a lot of the photographic artworks I produced last year, pretty much all of my abstract landscape series, were made from photos that I thought 'didn't quite cut it' originally. This year I want to continue going back through my older photos and saving the ones I would normally delete.

I thought every now and then I'd share some of the before and after pieces.
Starting with this one: Desert Portal.
The photo on the left is the original photo, taken late evening. It was a tree branch taken while taking photos of the Melbourne skyline.
The photo on the right is the finished Desert Portal artwork. I'll have its story in another post.

On a slighty related note, I've opened a shop on Society6. So you can now purchase framed, unframed and canvas prints of my artworks online!

2016!

Happy New Year!
It's been a little while since I've posted anything, quite a few things have happened, including getting married, changing my business name from Tig's Garden to trading under my new married name (Joy Phillips), and getting a puppy!

Kodak - our Golden Retreiver

I'm doing the 100 day goal with the Business Bakery again to help me towards my yearly goal. So the beginning of 2016 I will be working on getting my website up and running, adding lots of stock to my Etsy shop and working on some new 2D and 3D artworks.

Close up of a new work in progress