Art Book Illustration - Faux

About a year ago, a friend of ours' from Oregon flew in to visit. On the Sunday that the Senate voted on the new health care bill, we did a whirlwind tour of the monuments on the National Mall, and checked out the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress - walking from Foggy Bottom Metro Station, the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials, to WWII Memorial, and the around the Capitol. While walking through the National Gallery, I saw this painting and thought about an art appreciation class I took in college a long time ago. I also subscribed to the Time-Life art book series, and remember the illustrations and how certain details were highlighted. I did the same with this piece - a faux art book illustration. The captions for the details could read: (a) detail of bow in hair, and (b) illusion of text in a book, pre-impressionist style. The painting is titled: A Young Girl Reading, painted by Jean-Honor'e Fragonard on canvas with oils, in about 1776.

Adobe Photoshop is a great piece of software. I use it all the time to reduce the size of digital images for use in PowerPoint presentations. I typically use images from my agency's Information Staff Image Gallery, and since these are high quality, they would take up a lot of space in my presentation files if I didn't reduce them. There are also fun features to distort the images. Here are three examples - I wish I could paint like these look. The top image is titled Range of Lights. I noticed when walking east on Jefferson Street from the USDA Whitten Building entrance that faces the Mall, how as the sun was setting, the top of the Smithsonian "Castle" building was still illuminated, while the lower parts of the building were shaded by the horizon from the west. When this happens towards sunset in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the effect is referred to as the range of lights. The place from where I took the photograph is always a good spot for viewing the Marine Corps Marathon that runs every October through the Downtown D.C. area. The middle image is titled: Oregon Coast - After Christmas and Before the New Year. Two years ago with no planning, some friends of ours' in Albany, Oregon and we took off right after Christmas and spent a couple of nights at Lincoln City on the Pacific coast - right off the beach. This was a view from our balcony looking towards the north. The third image is titled: Produce Isle, and was a picture taken at a Safeway store - high priced vegetables, but nicely displayed.