"On a Summer's Eve"

I spent all day yesterday working on another entry into the Woot derby. It features children catching fireflies beneath a starry sky and I've titled it "On a Summer's Eve." The theme is "negative space" which simply means that a design element is created by what is around it. Sound familiar?

Having just used this technique, I felt primed to do it again, and thought I could do it more quickly this time. Well... not as quickly as I thought. But it got finished and entered, so if you feel it deserves a vote (now through July 3, 2014, noon Central Time), I'd be honored.

I've yet to look at the competition, but I'm sure there are many fine entries as there always are, so be sure to check those out as well.

Tip for the day: Avoid my mistake. Sometimes I'll be working with Photoshop, and it just doesn't seem to work right. I'll check all the settings, try the function again, and still get the wrong result.

This happened to me yesterday, consuming considerable time in confundation, convincing me the program had gone wonky. Every time I tried to "erase" something I'd painted onto a mask in white by going over it in black, it wouldn't erase completely and ended up looking like I'd painted on it with white at 5% opacity. Drove. Me. Crazy.

Eventually I found my error. I'd checked all the parameters except the color. I'd thought I was using black, but there was actually a very dark gray in the palette, which I'd used briefly and forgotten about. It certainly looked black. Once I corrected that, everything functioned as expected.

Well there you have it. Don't take anything for granted and check everything.

Thanks for visiting and please come again!  (And don't forget to vote!)

Cooling Down with "Rainbow Ices"

This week I pulled out an older design I had earlier intended to upload to Zazzle, but had hesitated thinking it wasn't quite right. It had begun with an experiment in using primary colors at 50% opacity, overlapping them to make a rainbow. I repeated this many times, eventually figuring out that doubling up on the primary colored stripes would give me a comparable opacity to the ones that had overlapped colors. I also adjusted the "primary" colors somewhat more to my liking, with pink and sky blue.

After that, I played around with numerous filters, and especially liked this version, thinking it had a frosty look to it, like a closeup of stacked ice pops of different colors.

But not quite.

In looking at it again, I decided it needed a little more highlight and shadow to imply three dimensions. While it's not a favorite method, I decided to do this with the Dodge and Burn tools, whose symbols look like a magnifying glass and a hand making an "o" shape in the PSE toolbox. The easiest way to remember which is which is to think of toast: when it burns, it's a darker color, but if it pops out of the toaster "dodging" the heat, it's lighter.

 

These tools can do a lot of damage, and the best way to handle them is in small amounts, building on their effect if necessary. Unlike the paint brush or pencil, every time the brush passes over an area, it adds to the effect, whether you've lifted the brush in between or not.

Working on a copy (always leave an original in tact!), I set these tools to just 5%. With a soft brush sized to less than one third the width of a stripe, I gently stroked the Dodge tool over the center of each stripe to increase the highlight, and the Burn tool over the lines where the colors met to shade them. Then I narrowed the brush, and did a little more on the centers of those areas, the result appearing like scalloped edges rising toward the viewer.

Not much of a piece of art by itself, but it's simple things like this that can make a great design when applied to practical items such as the many offered on Zazzle. I have one family member who has always been crazy for rainbows and anything rainbow-colored, and I'll bet you know someone like that too!

(The black dots on some of these images are links to open the new customizing features on Zazzle's site--not part of the product or design.)



Thanks for visiting and please come again!

"Simple Celebration" is in the Woot Derby

Woot.com has a derby. No, not the type of hat Charlie Chaplin wore as "The Little Tramp." And not a horse race either, though the truth is not that far off. It's a shirt derby where any artist can enter a t-shirt design and be voted on by the Woot community.

If you've read some of my previous blog posts, you may have seen that I've entered designs at another site, but Woot is a little different. First, it runs the course of one week and follows a very specific time table. There's always a theme and rules about subjects that can't be included, and art must have all colors on separate layers and converted to halftones to represent anything less than 100% opacity. It took me a while to even figure all that out, and one of the drawbacks of working only with Photoshop Elements is that halftones can only be made with dots and not lines. (If anyone knows of a good plug-in that will allow a PSE user to do halftones in lines, please comment and let me know!)

I like to get my entry in as early as possible, but with only 24 hours between the theme announcement and beginning of entry acceptance, my life has become too complicated to do that very often. But every now and then, they'll hint at the following week's theme, and I can use that time to my advantage.

Seven days ago they dropped the hint "Americana," and this became my project for the week: spending an old-fashioned 4th of July watching fireworks.

The trickiest part of making this design concerned the fact that the dog and people are not really there. The background is navy blue and there is no black ink where they appear. But that doesn't mean that I didn't actually draw them.
 

I drew them on a separate layer, then selected them with PSE's magic wand. With the selection active, I went to the other layers of color and hit DELETE. That simple.

For the highlights, I did something similar. I drew the reflected colors on the spaces left by the previous deletion, on layers separate from the others. Then I again selected the images I'd drawn, but inverted the selection (CTRL-SHIFT-I). When I went to the other color layers and hit DELETE, I was then getting rid of everything except the color on the images. In the completed design, there was no need for the original dog and people I'd drawn to be visible.

If you've ever purchased anything at all from Woot.com, you're eligible to vote in the derby at shirt.woot.com between now and noon Central Time, June 19, 2014. Please stop by to see all the wonderful entries, and any votes for "Simple Celebration" are greatly appreciated!

And one more thing: Derby winners usually sell for $12 on their debut, but if there are at least 1,776 unique voters this week, those shirts will cost only $10! Good price for a shirt, so exercise your right to vote!

Thanks for visiting and please come again!

Framing "Sunlit Iris"

And it's back to photo editing this week...

A few weeks ago I got a lovely shot of an iris while visiting a local park. It was getting on into early evening and camera in hand, I was disappointed to find nearly everything in shadow—I have a strong preference for shooting subjects in sunlight as there's so much more hidden color that can be brought out with editing. I was wandering about enjoying the spring weather when I came across this iris, magnificently back lit with filtered sunbeams. I took around a dozen shots of it, but as often turns out, the first was the best, even capturing some of the crepuscular rays.

Later that weekend, my fellow blogger Firebonnet ran a feature she calls "Random Moments of Delight," a beautifully self-explanitory theme. She invites her readers to share theirs as well and I shared this iris saying I might yet do some artistic editing on it. This week I pulled it out to start playing with it, and here is the result, "Sunlit Iris":

This one went through a great many steps to reach it's final appearance, including multiple filters, masks and a subtle texture all blended together.

What I'll share here is how I experimented on the masked border.

In removing the edges of this image I could have erased them, but that would be a permanent change to the image, and if I didn't like how it was turning out, there would be a great deal of backtracking to start over.

Instead, I used a layer mask. Clicking the icon that looks like a gray rectangle with a circle on it above (or below, depending on your version of Photoshop) the layers palette adds the mask to the selected layer. When it's all white, it makes no change to the image, but wherever you put some black, the image disappears. It's very easy to adjust or start over by re-adding white.

A solid layer can be placed beneath the image to show through where the edges are removed, but if you want to save that layer to print without any background, be sure to make it not visible and save the image as a .png file.

With my iris picture, I started first with a larger soft brush, but not happy with the result, went over the edges again with a more jagged shape. That ended up looking too sharp, so I tried applying a blur to the mask, and ended up with a torn edge appearance that pleased me.

While working on this project I was reminded of the time I had the privilege of viewing Van Gogh's Irises, up close and personal. In the early 1990's I was on a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (the old one in Malibu) when I turned a corner and there it was directly in front of me. The surprise took my breath away and I lingered before it in awe for quite some time. I always admired the simplicity with which it had been displayed, and while I would have enjoyed seeing it just as much had I waited in line to view it from behind velvet roping, the experience I did have made an emotional impact that lets me relive that experience over and over. Somehow I think Vincent would have appreciated that.



Thanks for visiting and please come again!

For the Love of Music

Music is very much a temporal art. How many pictures can you glance at in any moment? How fast can you read? Some DVD players let you watch a movie at increased speed without losing the sound. And while it's true that you'll enjoy these things more at a leisurely pace, listening to music is one pastime that can't be rushed.

I have a strong background in music and love nearly every type. From classical, rock, pop, and New Age to folk musics from around the world, it's all good. I hate driving without some tunes and listen at my computer as long as I have the RAM to support it. Even when it's quiet around me, there's usually a tune inside my head. And with all the wonderfully talented and creative musicians in the world spreading their art faster and further than ever before, there's just no way anyone can take it all in.

That's the inspiration I felt when I made this design, "So Much Music, So Little Time."

I wanted it to be fairly simple and show how music enriches our minds and fills our world with "color for the ears." While I adore bright colors, sometimes they have the greatest impact when contrasted with neutrals. In this design, the music is what it's all about, and that's where the color is.

Threadless.com is currently running a themed competition called "Make Your Statement," and this particular statement of mine has been accepted for scoring now through the morning of June 5, 2014. If you have an account with Threadless, please click over there and put in your two cents worth.


Thanks for visiting and please come again!

"Butterfly Ripples"

The weather has been very warm this week—even a few days of break-out-the-shorts-and-tank-tops warm—and after the winter we endured, it's more than welcome. It also means more springtime inspired art!

Butterflies are another thing I love about warm weather. Who doesn't love them?  They're second only to bees in the service of pollination and their presence is a positive reflection of the environment's health. They're symbols of transformation and one of the most popular tattoo image choices among women. Even total insectophobes are likely to admit that butterflies are non-threatening and beautiful.

As butterflies move from flower to flower, I go from one project to another; I feel a resonance with them. Not long ago I needed to design a buddy icon and wanted it to feature a butterfly. I liked what I came up with, and this week re-worked that design into something more.


Initially I drew a simple butterfly using a photo of a lovely blue one as a guide. Of course I couldn't possibly stop there and tried running the image through various filters, eventually deciding Chrome had the "cool factor" I was after. Next I made gradient overlay and put that through a few edits.

I liked how it turned out, but in my haste to complete the icon, had not made any record of all the steps and settings used to create the look in case I wanted to duplicate it. When I wanted to make a version where the butterfly sat on a larger field, I was stuck in a guessing game attempting to retrace my steps (a rather un-butterfly-like activity). This is what I came up with. I call it "Butterfly Ripples" (shown here is the cutout version).

Recreating the gradient was no trouble. I went back to that layer in the original and used the color picker to get the exact shades of orange and purple I'd used before and made another of the Radial type. This time, instead of a portion of the the circle being in the picture, I wanted the whole thing. But I also knew I'd probably make a pattern with this design, so I didn't want it perfectly centered as that would make the pattern too uniform and hard on the eyes.

So I drew it off center, copied the layer, rotated that one 180 degrees, then played around with the blending modes to see what looked interesting (experiment and see what works--my standard procedure). In this case, it was Luminosity. It gave the image depth, or perhaps, as it turned out after more filters were added, the impression of seeing double.

After making copies of each layer and merging those, it was time for some filters. First I posterized it going to Filter>Adjustments>Posterize. (This is a little different than Poster Edges found under the Artistic Filters.) This put some definition into the gradient and produced the rings that looked like water ripples after tossing a pebble into a still pond. Recalling having used Plastic Wrap and Paint Daubs with the Sparkle Brush, I experimented along those lines next. I never did get the exact look, but was happy with the result.

I added in three copies of the butterflies in different sizes. With the buddy icon, a fair amount of the gradient layer was visible on the butterfly, but as a small portion of the image, they just looked blah. I made them more interesting by adding a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to colorize them with a golden yellow hue. I finished up by adding some shadow beneath them with Layer Styles, placing them under the gradient layer, and changing the gradient's blending mode to Overlay. Just look at this closeup displaying the incredible detail in the final work.

Thanks for visiting and here are some of the Zazzle products I made with this design:

Thanks for visiting and please come again! 

Have an extra busy schedule coming up for the next week or two... might be longer than usual before I can post again. Or maybe I will manage it. We'll just have to see. : )

"Paddling Day"

With spring on the calendar (and the weather sometimes attempting to agree), my thoughts have been wandering to warm weather activities. Kayaking on a placid lake is one of my favorite ways to get some sun. Gliding along, glimpsing turtles and herons, feeling the refreshing coolness of splashing water... it's the most tranquil sport I've ever done.

I've been meaning to do something collage-y with my photos and thought of a particular technique I wanted to try. I'm not sure if it has a specific name...it fits with the definition of a "photomontage," though most examples of this have a different nature. (If anyone knows of a name for this, please comment and let me know!)  Anyway, the idea naturally collided with my thoughts of skimming the water providing me with an enjoyable subject. And here is the result of my effort. I call it "Paddling Day."

It takes more time and effort to properly load and secure a kayak to a roof rack than anyone who's never done it would imagine. Finally getting to that watery destination always finds me full of that "almost there!" excitement and for me this image sings of that joyful anticipation.

From the distance, it simply looks like an SUV parked at a lake waiting for a kayak to be unloaded from the roof. But this picture is actually composed of pieces from numerous other photographs. Can you recognize any of these in the picture? (hover to identify)



Using a photo of a kayak-topped car as a model (though parked in another location), I cut out matching pieces from these and other photos and fit them together like puzzle. Some were edited to alter their color... I either played with the hue slider or desaturated it completely then opened the color editor again to colorize it.

I really enjoyed this project and plan to do more like this in the future. If you like it too, check out the products on which it's available on Zazzle!


Thanks for visiting and please come again!

Drawing (Somewhat) Realistic Fire with Photoshop Elements

Very often I get an idea, then search the internet for tutorials on how to accomplish it. Usually the ones I find are based on the more expensive version of Photoshop. Sometimes I can get a reasonable look by following these directions to the extent that I can, but at other times, PSE's lack of certain tools leaves me floundering. At that point, I try to figure out a way to do it anyway, applying various ideas I've gleaned in my research. (I'm using PSE 11.)

This week I had hoped to present a new design I was making for an entry into one of Threadless's themed competitions, but life and computer complications prevented me from completing it before the deadline. My design included fire, and in wanting to make it as realistic as I could, ended up devising my own method for doing so in PSE. I hope other PSE users will find this helpful.

1.  Begin by opening a blank document and filling the background with black. Here I'm using 5" x 5" at 120 px/in. On another layer, I add some color samples off to the side so when I'm ready to change colors, I can just use the color picker. I'm using fef00e (yellow), fe960e (orange), and fe250e (red).













2.  We'll need some thin yellow lines. You can draw them, but here I'm going to use the "Grass 2" shape, making it tall and thin. Don't make it too tall, as we'll be stretching it out upwards. Simplify the shape if you're using that method.














3.  Using the color picker, make orange your foreground color. Rasterize the shape by holding CTRL and clicking the thumbnail in the layers palatte. Now go to Edit>Stroke (Outline) Selection. Make sure orange is the color in the dialogue box, and "Inside" is selected under Location. Choose an appropriate width. I'm using just 1 px here. Click OK.

If you can't see the orange or it's blocking out too much of the yellow, just undo the action (CTRL-Z), adjust the width, and do it again.

4.  Change the foreground color to red, then stroke it again. This time choose "Outside" for Location. I'm using 1 px again, but if you used a larger number for the orange, consider using a little less for the red. Click OK. Deselect the image (CTRL-D) then go to the layers palatte and make 2 copies of this layer.


One of these layers is simply a backup in case you decide to trash a layer and start over. Since we'll work only one at a time, only one needs to be visible.











5.  With the visible layer, go to Filter>Distort>Liquify. Go over each of your lines with the Warp Tool (top of the tools on the left--looks like a hand finger-painting). Go over each or the lines a few times giving each a little bit of wiggle. I used a brush size of 20 (diameter should be a little more than the thickness of the lines) and brush pressure of 100. Click OK. It should look something like this:

6.  Now take the smudge tool and start bluring the liquified lines, first going in short upwards strokes, then gently smudging them out to the sides. I'm using a soft-edged brush at 20 px and 10% strength. (I recommend making a copy of this layer first. It's very easy to use more smudge strokes than you can undo, and if you'd like to start over, you won't have to re-do the liquify step as well).

7.  Make that layer invisible, then repeat the Liquify and Smudge steps with another layer. Try to make the Liquify wiggles a little different. For the Smudging on this layer, I changed the brush to 30 px and the strength to 60%. This time you want to really spread out the pixels, creating more tongues of flame from the lines. Make sure these end in a point, perhaps giving them some curves.  (Again, you might want to make a copy of the layer between these steps.)

8.  After that, make both layers visible. You can play with opacities, layer order and blending modes to see what looks best for your purposes. Here I have the more smudged layer on top with the blending mode set to Screen. The less smudged layer has the opacity set to 65%. And then you're done.


Oh, and one more nifty tidbit I discovered: When you want to undo a long series of actions (like a series of smudge strokes), you don't have to do CTRL-Z for every one. Just hold down CTRL and hit Z repeatedly as fast as you like. Nice little time (and irritation) saver.

Now get out that list of drawing ideas and set something on fire!


Thanks for visiting and please come again!