We are celebrating Women’s History Month this year with images that inform and empower, and often, when you learn the backstory, piss you off. On social media we will be using the hashtag #WHM18 on our posts so you can follow along.
I personally adore this image from the program of the Suffrage Procession. It is so proud and positive. White, purple, and gold were what we would today call the pallet of the brand of women’s suffrage. The image movement is forward or to the right. The banners, regalia, and horse signify strength and determination.
You can find out more of the specifics of the Women’s Suffrage Procession, including the entirety of the procession pamphlet, at the Library of Congress (LOC).
The LOC page about the Procession presents a good amount of information from before and after the event, including the assault on the march by men in town for the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson the next day. Hundreds were harmed, and in a vein similar to many current day protests and marches in the U.S., the police stood by and did little to protect the marchers and seemed to enjoy the actions and rudeness directed at the women. “One policeman explained that they should stay at home where they belonged.” Personal and group opinion with law enforcement determining which laws to enforce and interpreting the law for themselves has a long history. But the Chief of the Capitol Police lost his job, and in a backlash against the harassment and violence directed toward the women marchers the movement was re-energized and gained followers thanks to the press coverage of the attack.
This recording from 1958 certainly suggests that the “movement” did not end with the women’s vote and begin again only with the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The suffragettes are better referred to as suffragists. The struggle continues.
Petroglyphs from Rock Art Ranch
Yesterday was the most amazing day I have had in a long long time.
Woke up in Holbrook, Arizona and drove about 15 miles west south west to Rock Art Ranch. I have tons of photos, but let me share a couple of the highlights of the canyon with you.
Here you can clearly see the figure usually called Kokopelli, or the Flute Player, and a big horned sheep. Poor Kokopelli. He has been co-opted and his image diminished from the majesty and magic he commands here and obviously commanded to the first peoples of this area.
Another absolutely astonishing image I encountered might at first appearance seem simple. The ranch owner told us that the simple line and arrow drawings, such as the one below, are believed by some east coast researchers to be over 9000 years old. I suspect he is getting good information from these researchers as two others he mentioned from the Arizona State Museum are researchers with whom I worked.
The petroglyph that moved me more than I can say is called “The Birthing Woman” and you will have to wait to see it as I want to write about it on The Women’s Legacy Project site, which I do not have time to do now, as I need to get on the Road and head toward Oklahoma. I am going to knock off earlier today so I have time to write about the sites and thoughts I have been fortunate enough to experience during the day and a half I have been on the road thus far.
The Books of Our Mothers' Mothers
One of the best things about living in the future, as I refer to the 21st Century, is access to information that has come before. And I in my feminist way, of course, am referring to the bits and pieces of daily life that get lost along the way to posterity, notoriety, and history… the daily stuff of the lives of families, women and children.
I love being able to flip through the pages of a catalog or a Ladies Publication from 100 to 150 years ago. These acts give me a sense of connectedness to the culture of my foremothers. My maternal grandmother was born in 1883. She began having children in 1910 with the birth of my Uncle Carl. The last of those children, my Aunt Alice, passed away early in September of the year at the age of 92.
How on Earth can I convey the sense of connectedness and continuity of family to my 4-year-old grand daughters when the generations in my part of the family tend toward the long side?
I can read to them from children’s literature of the time when my mother was being read to by her mother, 100 years ago. My mother was born in 1914.
This morning I surfed on over to archive.org and found A Book of Cheerful Cats. I downloaded a PDF of this delightfully illustrated tome to read to the twins when they visit. I will also print out copies to color, cut, glue, glitter and with which to generally have fun.
Somehow I find the search for images from other times and childhoods to be relaxing and rewarding. When I was little I would look through my mother’s tattered memorabilia from her childhood. I was the fifth kid of my mom’s who pawed through her stuff, and it was worse for the wear. While the tactile experience is gone, the rich content of books from those times, minus the allergy inducing dust and mildew, is out there waiting for new generations of family and rainy or snowy afternoons.
No Pumpkin Or Cat Silhouette Images, Please
I went scavenging at Pixabay.com for images to use on this blog this month, October, and quickly became bored with orange pumpkins, cutout silhouettes of cats, and depictions of ugly crone witches.
So I found some images that are not unique or totally original, but that have a truth of season in them.
Foggy field. With orange, but not smothering. I cropped.
A bench in golden light. It captures the lonely, sadness that visits so many people in the fall.
Cat eyes. Black cats get such a bad rap.
A room that just calls out for a seance.
Another dark foggy path through wooded land.
Too much orange sky but adding an alpha channel, and cutting most of the sky, makes the church silhouette all the more ominous.
Now please do not get me wrong, I loved making spooky Halloween cakes for my daughter’s class parties when she was little. And expected was good for seasonal Girl Scout crafts when I was a leader.
One of the plus sides of being done nesting, I do not like the word empty or the phrase empty nester, is that I can observe the seasons as I like. Art and photography for my blog is a great way to do it. And with high quality public domain images readily available at Pixabay.com I, and other bloggers, do not need to spend tons on images for sites that do not make much if any income, and neither do we have to settle for tacky or low resolution clip art to stay within the law. I am also uploading some images to the site for others to use. And the folks that run the site actually have found a few of my photos of high enough quality to accept for use on the site. I love cooperative, sharing economies.
Friday Find – Photo Watermark by Ifunia
I am returning to my old ways. Sounds scary no? Actually it just means a bit more organization for me and predictability for you. I used to do Wednesday App of the Week. But today is Thursday and this post will go live tomorrow. So Wednesday App of the Week is transforming into a Friday Find. (Skip down to the Photo Watermark heading if you just want the review and not my delightful lead up to it.)
In the manner of any good 21st Century entrepreneur, the recent leaks of celebrity images, got me to thinking about how to protect my highly prized images. Oh stop it! Not that kind of image.
I have hundreds if not thousands of images that I created for use in Virtual Worlds when I built, played, and mingled in them. They were primarily textures I created using GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) an open source program much like Adobe PhotoShop®. I used them as wallpaper in buildings I made, and as fabrics for clothing, curtains, and pillows. Rocks, mountains and machines also had my images slapped on them. If you bought textures from Casita Gaia in Second Life®, those were textures I created.
Using these images more widely on the inter-webs means that I have something worth something. So rather than trying to turn these graphics into items for sale, I decided that I would use them in my own media and marketing efforts, and use them as image frames, meme-ish text backgrounds, and on occasion as plain old pretty images for my blog posts. To do this I need to watermark them, so it becomes more difficult for someone to lift them from my website or blog and use them.
As I said, I create images in GIMP. Love the product! But opening it and creating a transparent layer of the proper size to match and then overlay the various images and them batch processing them as new files takes more time than I want to spend. I knew there were lots of programs and apps that could do this, but I did not know of a specific one. I wanted to use the app on my desktop and laptop as that is where I access most of these textures for manipulation and not on one of my mobile devices as image manipulation on those just isn’t for these presbyopic eyes. So I scanned the apps in the App Store.
The Search
I searched the term “watermark.” A page that looked much like this one below resulted.
Some seemed too limited in scope. Some seemed too expensive. Some had rotten reviews or no reviews. Some were version 1.o.
I knew what I wanted; I’d been thinking about what I needed to do and how I wanted to do it for months upon months. So it was simple to eliminate the ones that did way too much, or that did not focus on watermarking. I already had a great image manipulation program. I wanted something just for watermarking. Anything without a review will not get my purchase; if someone wants me to beta test they are way off the mark they should ask for beta testers before marketing the app. Then I clicked on one with lots of good reviews that showed a $2.99 price. This page then came up.
It had a clever icon. I liked that… a lot. It also had a simple descriptive title. The reviews were well written, quite different and told me that people who had wanted to do what I wanted to do with my images sincerely like the app.
I did a quick search on the company, and it showed a legit company with a track record.
The Sale
The price was right. And the marketing of the price was right. In the image above you might be able to see the line just after the title that reads: ***** Limited -Time Special Offer!!! Regular Price: $18.99 ***** I am such a sucker for a bargain. The “reduced” price did it for me. I saw that and the purchase was made before I could stop myself, if I had wanted to stop.
PHOTO WATERMARK Wins My Approval
Intuitive, simple, effective. What more could I want? It did what it promised. It was easy. I have the products I wanted.
- I opened the app.
- I clicked add files and chose one of my textures. I repeated this until I had a bunch of images showing in the white work space below the active image area.
- I clicked on the text button on the upper right and then took my cursor and dragged a box over space on the image where I wanted text to appear and typed my text.
- Then I highlighted the text and clicked on the font button and selected a font and color, then I scaled and aligned the text box.
- I highlighted all the images in the white lightbox below the working area and made sure the one image I had typed text on was showing in the work active space and then selected the light blue “Apply to All” button.
- Then I pressed save and a save popup box appeared and I created a new folder and selected the type of file I wanted – .png or .jpg were the choices I remember.
- Then this resulted:
I’m a happy camper. I don’t know if I would have paid $18.99 for this. Probably not, I am cheap. But I am very happy with the products! I suspect there are many bloggers out there who would love the ease and effectiveness of this product.
As you can see, the watermarks do appear on different size images. I was able to alter individual marks after the watermark was applied to all the images to adjust location and such but before I saved them.
Photo Watermark by Ifunia gets my vote, and I haven’t even tested out a bunch of the functions of the the app. This company creates apps for both Windows and Macs so if Photo Watermark is not yet available for your PC, keep checking.
————-
I received no compensation for this review. I simply wrote about a product I purchased and liked.
Wordless Wednesday – Art Nouveau Graphics from 1917
Graphics from an Out of Copyright Source
Sunday evening I was perusing the Internet Archive at Archive.org while watching the new Cosmos series on the National Geographic Channel. These are images I captured from a not in copyright work: Strong’s Book of Designs, 1917.
I am sharing some of the general and seasonal images, that could be used as the basis of graphic art projects such as labels, web badges, and widget backgrounds. Interested in using any of these images in your projects? I recommend downloading them from the archive directly. Go to the title by clicking on the Strong’s… link, above.
The Art Nouveau styling in many of these is delightful, if you, like me, like that sort of thing.
Styles of Images Vary
Please check out the digitized book to get a more complete idea of what the book contains.
If you do not own Adobe Photoshop® to manipulate these images, an open source alternative is GIMP. GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. You may download the software for free, although donating to open source projects that you find useful is heartily encouraged.
Enjoy the graphics!
Reference:
Strong, Charles Jay and Lawrence Stewart Strong. 1917. Strong’s Book of Designs: a masterpiece of modern ornamental art. Chicago: F. J. Drake & Company
retrieved: 10 March 2014 https://archive.org/details/strongsbookofdes00stro