Automn's Persona
A Grapevine’s Persona - Digital Art Series

My process for creating A Grapevine’s Persona – Digital Art Series is similar to the way I create my figurative Persona series only instead of using drawing, paintings, or watercolors as a basis I am using photography. A Grapevine’s Persona series is dedicated to my husband who loves and introduced me to wines and going wine tasting. As we travel around vineyards I always have my camera close at hand, literally. I shoot anything and everything to find a composition. Yet I mostly concentrate my work on nature. The most wonderful thing about working with nature as your subject matter is that it is ever changing. Artist Robert Bateman states it best, “Everything in nature has its own personality.” You can never capture or see the same composition twice. There are always little nuances of change. When you take photographs or observe wildlife they almost never stay in that “perfect” composition you envision. Therefore you have to do a lot of improvisation and creativity to get the composition you desire.

I use Illustrator or Photoshop to create my digital composition silhouettes by hand on the computer adjusting each point, line, and curve to create the shapes that form grapes, vines, and leaves that are intertwined and frozen in time. Once I am happy with the silhouettes and the negative shapes that the black background creates I transfer the silhouettes into Photoshop. In Photoshop I then take my photographs and use a photomontage technique for the interior space of the digital silhouettes. This process can result in having up to and over 150 layers of grapes, vines, and leaves within each digital composition. Once I am happy with the photomontage process I sometimes choose to play around with the colors, levels, effects, etc. to express my thoughts for each composition. I then print out my composition most recently on dye infused metal.

Each of my digital compositions are numbered in a limited series per size.