Painting with light

A while ago I was borrowing Doug's camera, and I asked George to come over and teach me how to paint with light.  He said he saw a photo of Picasso painting with light, like the one below, when he was younger and figured out how to do it.

Basically, you set the camera on a long exposure, and start drawing shapes with some sort of light. The pink colored light is the light on the back of my Diana mini flash, the blue is George's black light flashlight, and the white is my iPhone LED light.  I used the latter.  When you see one or more of us (in addition to the lines created by the light, it's because George would make the flash go off, illuminating us.  The rest of the time, the room was dark, so that the light we were painting with would show more vividly.

This image is double exposed; the painting that you see on the right is actually on the other side of the apartment.

In this image, he tried to get it so half of each of our faces lined up.  This entailed me sitting on the couch and him making the flash go off, and then we switched seats and he made the flash go off again, so that the image double exposed.

He wasn't thrilled with how they came out, but I thought they looked pretty cool, so I decided to post.

Stella in Chanel Pre-Fall 2012

I <3 her.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! It doesn't feel like Christmas, given the weather we've been having in New York, but it's already here.

Below are two cards I made -- one for my brother, one for my parents.  Guess who got which card!

Doug by George

George took some photos of Doug last week in his apartment building, mostly in clothes that I picked out for him in the shopping trips to Barneys and Bloomies we've taken over the years.  Here are some of my favorite shots:

The first designer suit, a dark navy Dior Homme.

Worn with Burberry trench and my Burberry scarf.

Oliver Peoples' aviators

I want my scarf back, Doug!

Armani linen jacket that he actually picked out for himself.

Poolside in an Armani linen suit.

Same suit, with a matching tie.

John Varvatos leather jacket, hoodie, henley, boots, and Seven jeans.

Unfortunately I don't have a head-to-toe shot of the following look, which is the most recent purchase.  It's a grey wool suit, and I picked out the entire outfit head to toe.  I thought browns would set off the suit nicely, so we got a brown tie, belt, and shoes.  Even the manager of the John Varvatos store in SoHo where we got it was impressed with my styling. :-)

Doug's new "rolly"

To see more, check out George's blog.

Embroidered wedding portrait by my friend Lindy

My friend Lindy, a gifted writer who has a pop culture blog, also happens to like doing embroidery as a hobby.  She decided to do a portrait of her brother and sister-in-law, and enlisted my help to do a line drawing.

Here's the original photo:

I printed the photo out, and took out tracing paper and did this tracing:

She took the tracing and MacGyver'ed a lightbox to transfer the line drawing onto the fabric, and the final product was this:

It came out so pretty! I'm sure they will be thrilled.

Beautiful video of my dress!

I've been working on my portfolio over the past few months, and decided to enter a fashion competition using some of the designs.  I won't say which just yet, but the deadline is next week.

On Sunday, we shot one of the looks in Central Park and George did an amazing job.  I'll post some of the photos and sketches at some point, but for now, I wanted to share a video he shot on the Lomokino, which is a hand-cranked video camera that uses regular 35mm camera film.  It came out really beautifully.  I am really excited about how the photos came out, but want to wait a bit before I release them.  I'm still trying to decide on what I'm going to do with the designs.