My Blog and Me

This blog provided me the opportunity to  showcase my digital art and photography. It also gave me a platform to tell my stories – stories about myself, my interests and to showcase my digital art.

My interest involved pictures and stories that concern people in their everyday life activities. I’m therefore interested in Movies, art, design, architecture, dogs (my Bella), architectural and art history as well as music. I’m a collector of pop-up books and have quite a collection of architecture pop-up books, abstract art, fairy tales and other themes.

A collage from some of my artwork

Pictures, pictures and pictures – I have always been  interested in pictures and will always be. I had boxes full of pictures before this digital era.  Pictures tell stories. Since I learned and discovered Photoshop and Illustrator, BeFunky, Snagit Editor, Sketchpad (a Google Chrome app) and also Architectural Software such as AutoCAD, Revit and Google Sketchup, I become capable to create my own pictures and designs – it changed my world.

Not only can I use all these software programs and applications separately, it can also be used in coordination with each other. These applications enable me to create and design pictures, and I can also manipulate and change these pictures by applying different techniques  for artistic impressions.

Patterns

I also included digital photography as a separate category as part of my digital art. During my Building Design studies, I executed several projects,  including Urban Research, Landscaping and Studio. I took many pictures to showcase design elements, built-form, landscaping elements and environments – man-made elements that colour our world.

Read more about my Avatar, About me and My history by clicking on the links.

My Avatar

That’s me

This is my avatar that I used for most of my web-presence online accounts. This image is digitally manipulated from my driver’s license photo. It was taken when I was granted an Australian driver’s license in 2010.

I am not sure who owns the copyright to the photo. I investigated my current driver’s license, and could not find anything that prohibited me from using the photo for the purpose I used it for. The current manipulated image also does not show any resemblance to the original image.

However, more information concerning my driver’s license can be found here, from the Department of Transport.

My History

It is important for me to never forget where I came from – it made me what I am today. My past is where I learned my values through the people I met through life. Some were role models, but others were not. However, these people show me what to do in life and not  to do. I will treasure having all of them in my life forever.

The Queen Victoria Hospital

I was born a princess (Yes, I know what you may think, but I can imagine it – it is my fairy tale)

To explain this, I have to go far back to where I was born. My parents lived in Johannesburg, South Africa at that time and I became the second child in the household. The hospital where I was born was architectural wise a building that is nothing glamorous today, but I’m sure it was a unique building style of that era.

The hospital was built in the Hillbrow district of Johannesburg in the Gauteng Province, previously Transvaal. Some people referred to Johannesburg as Egoli – the place of gold due to its gold mining activities. Read more about Johannesburg’s history from this link.

The Princess part

Since my mother told me where I was born and why I am named Linda, I build pictures in my mind of a beautiful princess living in a castle.  My name apparently came from a very kind and beautiful nurse that worked in the maternity ward in the Queen Victoria Hospital. From a young age I read stories about Queen Victoria and put myself as a princess in the stories  and therefore I considered myself as a princess.

I always wondered how the hospital looks like and I was so lucky to find this image from someone’s blog who was born there too. I sent him a message to confirm his permission to use this photo on my blog to which he kindly gave me permission to include the above image in my blog – thank you, DWR.

The Queen Vic and its history

Queen Victoria Hospital

Queen Victorial Hospital

DWR’s blog contains more information on the hospital.  I also received more images from him and he told me that the building is no longer in use as a hospital. That explains the condition of the building which seems to need upgrading to be restored to its former glory. My investigation to find more information about the Queen Victoria Hospital led me to the following web page, which contains information about the architect who designed the building.

From Johannesburg to Brandfort

My parents moved around quite a bit throughout the years, but I live the most of my childhood years in Brandfort, a small farming community-town in the Free State. My strongest memory of Brandfort is the beautiful white angel statue in front of the church next to a monument in remembrance of the Anglo-Boer War. This angel was and is still very special to me – it is if she watches over the town as a guardian angel. The image of the church comes from a website about Brandfort (2008).

Dutch Reformed Church Brandfort, South Africa

From that time, onwards, I walked through many paths of life – ups and downs and sideways. I completed school and moved to Bloemfontein, a city in the Free State Province 65 Kilometers away from Brandfort to start my adult life.

To Bloemfontein

After working in Bloemfontein and moving to Kroonstad (also in the Free State), I once again moved back to Bloemfontein where I met my husband.  Our wedding day took place in the historic Two Towers Church situated in Church Street. I asked the owner of the Two Towers Church images’ permission to use it for my blog, to which he agreed. More info on Bloemfontein can be found on the SA History and Bloemfontein Info websites.

Towers Church Bloemfontein

Two Towers Curch Bloemfontein

 Moving to Pretoria

We moved to Pretoria in the Gauteng Province and later to several towns in Mpumalanga. Our two boys were born after five and eight years of marriage and for the next twenty plus years, I faced the biggest challenge of my life – I am a mother now in the full sense of the word. Since my two boys became young adults themselves, I started with my own studies to which I’m still a student today.

Pretoria from the Union Building’s garden’s terraces. The image belongs to carlosoliveirareis’ photostream and is declared to be available under the Creative Commons Licence agreement

Pretoria

Goodbye South Africa and hello Australia

Our family immigrated to Australia in July 2006 and we settled in Canberra – a beautiful city with a dry climate –  very hot in summertime and extremely cold in the winter. I am still studying, a wife and a mother, but I am thankful for everything that life has given me – the good and the bad. How can I appreciate the good if I never had the bad?

After arriving in our new country, I often think about what we had left behind – our culture, language, family, friends, pets, our mountains and seas, forests and streams, cars, our house and some belongings that did not fit in the container. Some of these can be bought again, but some are a matter of precious memories that we can only carry in our hearts. We had to start a new life in Australia that includes a new culture and language – it was difficult but,… exciting. I wrote the following poem about us leaving South Africa as a reflection of our move from the place where we were born, to a new country where we have to settle in a different environment –  with a different culture, language and systems, which will take a long time to get use to.

 

The New Country 

 

We fly over the sea – my family and me, It is a time of new beginnings….. Or will it be a disaster?

Our suitcases are filled with old country’s belongings – stories and memories of decades gone by. Excitement and fear filled our hearts that are bouncing. Who will be blessed – the country or us?

The new country is waiting, how will it be? Will it be friendly, green and inviting? Who will be blessed – the country or us?

Many days lay behind us – will the new ones be different? Who will be blessed? We or the unknown. Will the next days be filled with laughter… or sadness?

Who will be blessed – the country or us?

Who am I?

I consider my childhood years, with a street full of friends and pets to play with, as my anchor point. I will always remember that time as very happy and creative.

We were mostly playing outside, and our favourite activities were to draw pictures in the sand and made up stories by creating our own world of drama. We also built houses from rocks and planted flowers we picked from our gardens that never grew, because they had no roots. It was an enjoyable time and I will never forget it.

I am still making pictures and stories, and I enjoy other peoples’ stories by going to the movies and reading books. I am no longer building houses with rocks, but I can draw them for others to build using digital drafting software. I also learned that plants need roots to anchor in the ground.

My childhood years and studies (mostly in art and design) prepared me for what I am today. It provided me with the knowledge, tools, and skills to practice digital art, and to become a digital artist.

More information about my history can be found under the My History menu item.

My Digital Art Journey

I can still remember my drawings in the sand with a wooden stick as my drawing pen, if it was yesterday. I mostly drew hearts and houses and dressed them with flowers. My interest in drawing has therefore been a passion since a very young age, and it was strengthened by getting exposure to art projects during my school years and beyond.

Our prose and poem books in primary school had to be illustrated, and I was so brave to sign up myself to my small town’s yearly agricultural show event – displaying my illustrated books and arranging flowers.

I always won second and third prizes, but that has not stopped me from participating – it was not the prize but the learning experience. My illustrations improved each year, and I persist in submitting art projects every subsequent year until I left school.

My growing years did not include information processing systems and the Internet. My computer education started in 2005 learning Microsoft Office. After mastering the Microsoft Office package, I enrolled in Architectural drafting courses. I practiced day and night and I nearly gave up. All the cry, struggle, and perseverance drove me to master AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max.

The gratifying part of AutoCAD was the 3D stream, and together with 3D Studio Max, creating images from 2D drawings became more interesting. Applying this knowledge, I enrolled for an Architectural design course that involved learning more digital software, including Revit, Sketchup, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

Learning all these software packages became my new crying game. I struggled and practiced and I kept ‘my eye on the prize because of my desire to succeed. There was no way of giving up, although I considered quitting multiple times.

Gaining more confidence, I started to experiment in different digital drawing techniques and I experimented with other software to create different effects. I realised that all these digital software can be used in combination to create more extensive digital art images.

All these experiences enabled me to investigate, prepare and create several digital art projects with the wondrous capabilities of Web 2.0 technologies. I therefore set myself as a digital artist, because I use digital technologies to create artwork. These capabilities enable me to be in an artistic virtual community where I hold social networking relationships with other digital artists, especially DeviantArt, BeFunky and my blog.

Believing all these above, my digital art journey has commenced from the sand as my canvas, to the digital. My digital artwork is full of colour and it represents images that are dear to me. I am still like a small kid with a colouring book using my imagination to create images that recount stories.

Read more about my topic at Understanding Digital Art.