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By Mom Unplugged, July 8, 2010 7:23 pm

On Fridays I am going to try something new. Since I am continuously trying to dance a fine line between blogging about being an “unplugged family” and actually unplugging myself, I thought it might be fun to try quickly posting a simple photo once a week of an unplugged moment.

Hopefully it might be a less time-consuming way to encourage others to unplug, even if just a little. For those who come here more for activity or craft ideas, they still might find something to produce that inspirational spark without a lot of words.

It’ll be kind of like a yard sale or a thrift store, you never know what you’ll find each Friday (but I’ll try to make it pretty) … and it will take me very little online time to post a tiny photographic slice of our unplugged time.

See you tomorrow for a Tiny Slice of Time!

PS. I could be brutally honest and balance this out each week with a photo of our NON-unplugged time, but that would mostly be photos of me on the computer in many varieties of clothing (shorts, jeans, dresses, pajamas…), so I’ll just leave all that to your imaginations!

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By Mom Unplugged, August 9, 2009 9:39 pm

We’re back from France and finally over the jet lag. Time for the weekly Unplugged Project to resume!

The theme for this week’s Unplugged Project is photograph so we came up with a super-easy photo project using some of the many photos from our trip.

Inspired by a very old, hand-colored black and white photograph of my mother as a child, I thought it might be fun to turn some of our trip photos into old-fashioned, or maybe even funky-looking colored pictures.

First we each chose a few favorite trip photographs to play with. Since our pictures were all digital, it was easy to transform them into black and white using my photo editor (not exactly “unplugged,” but this is just the first step).

After experimenting a bit, I found that for darker pictures, or those with many dark colors, the result was improved by lightening the exposure slightly (any simple photo editor can do this also).

TIP: Before altering with your photos with the editor, make a duplicate of your photo and use that. You don’t want to permanently change your one and only copy of that favorite picture!

We printed the new black and white pictures onto plain white document paper. Regular paper is easier to color on than photo paper, and even if the picture appears a bit grainier on ordinary paper, that simply adds to the old/artsy effect.

Wait for the ink to dry completely before moving on to the next step. This might take a little while if the picture has lots of dark bits.

When everything is dry, you can start coloring. We used colored pencils since they allow the picture to show through the color.

• You can try to reproduce the real colors (more or less - of course the cat wasn’t really yellow!), such as here:

• Or have fun and do crazy colors for more of a modern art look:

• Experiment with pressing hard, or lightly.

• Keep the colors in the same family, or vary them.

• Try coloring some areas and leaving others black and white.

Whatever you decide to do, the effect is really beautiful, almost luminescent sometimes!

The children and I found this fun and easy, even my 3 year-old. She wanted to color a baby picture of herself. I love that green hair:

Use your pictures for a scrapbook or album, frame them, or make a collage out of them. You could even turn them into cards or family gifts.

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If you joined in this week’s Unplugged Project with your own photograph project, then please put a link to your project post (not just your blog) in Mr. Linky below. Please leave a link in a comment too since Mr. Linky has been having problems lately. If you didn’t do a photograph project, then please don’t link, but read more about how to join in here. We’d love to have you!

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The theme for next week’s Unplugged Project will be:

Pocket

Have fun!

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Comments (11)

By Mom Unplugged, May 4, 2008 8:25 pm

Green was the theme for this week’s Unplugged Project. When I thought of green, I was planning on being clever and doing a “green” (ie. recycled) project, instead of one involving the color green. I had a plan…but I won’t divulge it, we’ll just do it another week.

The weather was so lovely today that the children wanted to take a “kids’ walk” (a short walk that I let them do by themselves down our quiet road and back home on the golf course cart path - total time en route: about 5 minutes). Rather than keep them inside for a project on a day like today, instead I suggested they bring along the camera and take pictures of everything they saw on their walk that was green.

Kids love cameras and digital cameras are perfect for kids. Children armed with cameras take lots of pictures and most don’t come out too well, but there are often a few great ones in amongst the blur. Even if you buy an inexpensive disposable camera, why pay for processing a bunch of fuzzy photos? Especially when very simple digital cameras are so inexpensive nowadays.

If you do buy your children a camera, I have one word of advice (learned from experience): buy one with a rechargeable battery. They will take LOTS of pictures, forget to turn it off, etc. Most cheap kids’ cameras have regular old batteries that will last about half an hour under such conditions. This could either turn into a very expensive proposition, or you’ll never want to let your kids use their camera because of the cost of batteries! So - spend a tiny bit more for the camera and get one with a long-lasting, rechargeable battery they can actually use.

End of digression.

Here are the best results of their green scavenger hunt (7 out of 25 photos a success - see what I mean about the value of a digital camera for kids?). Because I realize that my kids’ photos of pine needles may not be quite as fascinating to the general public as my children might like to believe, these 7 pictures are in slide show format that you can choose to view or not. The point is, that a Photo Scavenger Hunt of any kind, can be great fun for children, especially outside on a lovely day!

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If you took part in this week’s Unplugged Project then please put your link in Mr. Linky (plus comment in case we lose Mr. Linky for some reason) .

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Next week’s Unplugged Project theme will be:

Newspaper

I hope to see you all next Monday! What can you do with the theme Newspaper?

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