Many moons ago Mie and I were lucky enough to have portraits made by Julian Cash of SuperSnail.com using a painting-with-light technique he had been working on. For this week's project I tried using the same technique. It involves setting the camera on a tripod in a dark room, then opening the shutter for a long period of time as you use various lights to draw over the scene.

I talked Mie into being my model, which wasn't too hard, and then talked her into letting me post them on the Internet, which was somewhat difficult. Here's some, the rest are in my Painting With Light Flickr set.

My two light sources were a glowing pig and a small flashlight (usually with my finger covering the bulb):

Mie got me some Sculpey from an art supply store. It's this clay-like stuff that is very soft and malleable until you bake it and it hardens. I spent a couple of hours playing with it tonight. It's hard to work with. It's too soft really. In the end I couldn't do anything of a realistic nature I was satisfied with so I started going for more abstract shapes and textures. What I ended up with was a set of four chopstick rests.

Mie once told me a story about when she moved to Japan at age 9, an american kid who could only speak English, and was thrust into a Japanese elementary school. She had a hard time being accepted there and it changed her from being a gregarious young girl to someone who was shy and lacked self-confidence. The students there found her so strange and foreign that they would crowd around the windows of her classroom to get a peek of her.

For this week's piece I used three different images, ran them through vector magic and combined them in Illustrator then added ink and watercolor.

Images used (creative commons licensed):