Jan Geisen

COMBINING MY PASSIONS

I started my artistic life as a photographer decades ago and later fell in love with polymer clay. Now with the advent of high quality digital photography and wonderful image manipulation tools I have been having fun combining these two artistic passions.

The thread that runs through all my work, independant of the medium used, is a love abstract composition. I have been having a great time taking photographs of my polymer clay jewelry and using The Gimp software (an open source image manipulation program similar to Adobe) to create digital mosaics.

Here is a brooch I call Pod and Bone. It made some great digital mosaic photographs. This was my first successful digital mosaic created from my jewelry. I was still learning how to use the software so didn't use any special features of The Gimp software, except to made the layers transparent. I also added a border.

This variation is very similar to the first one. I just added a small section of the mirrored image and rotated it. Good composition works when viewed from various angles. Though there is usually one direction that is most pleasing.

For this variation I used less saturated colors, in addition to using transparencies. I liked how it changed the feeling of the photo.

Here is another successful digital mosaic. The brooch is called Circle of Endless Possibilities. I gave it that title because it looked good no matter which direction I turned it. Using it to make digital mosaics really creates endless possibilities.