Crafting in self-isolation

By Elizabeth Prata

We are at the present time advised by health and government officials to remain at home and to only venture out to make essential trips. We are to maintain a distance of 6 feet from people we may speak with along the way, aside from immediate family under our own roofs of course. These guidelines, and in some case mandated legal ordinances, are due to the highly infectious COVID-19 virus spreading from nation to nation like wildfire.

I have a ton of things to keep my busy. One thing is to do some crafts. I was putting together a birthday gift last week and I realized that I was low on medium-sized items. Gotta fix that.

I also wanted to pick up where I left off on Pixlr, and using the photo editing and manipulation app to do some creative productions of some of my crafts I'd scanned in. I like using a real piece of art in the digital to add to it. I don't know why. It's just fun.

Here are some of the items I played with digitally. I'll explain each one.

Here is the original. It is a book cover I painted. At the time I was practicing painting techniques and layering. I am not being coy when I say I am really not good at art. I see it in my mind but I just can't make my hands do it right. But I keep trying. Thank goodness for tutorials on Youtube!

Here it is after I played with it using some Pixlr overlays.

This was a Lomo camera photo of two people walking in a hall

I scanned it in, digitized it and put it in an altered book. That's when you take a discarded book, paint over the pages, leaving some words exposed if you want, and make collages on the pages.

This final one is the digitized, manipulated piece with Pixlr overlays.

Here is a stenciling and painting piece I did in my art journal.

I manipulated it using different overlays and put them all into a 4-piece collage:

Here is a file folder collage I did:

And then the added digital stuff-

This upcoming week I'll so some more real life art and practice some things I am attempting to learn. I'll probably scan them and let you know how I did. What are your hobbies? And will our homes all look like this when we're let out again?