how I made the art

— January 31 —

So this is the last day of my month-of-blogging challenge. While it’s true I technically “wrote” every day, I don’t think I did a very good job of fulfilling the challenge. I may have even driven some regular readers away with my blog about nothing.

I shall try again in February. No guarantees it will get better, but even still I want to continue the “every day” challenge.

SO. This one is for Nancy, in particular, who wanted to know how I created yesterday’s “eyeball” picture. Nancy, it’s all in the apps. I won’t (can’t) tell you the specific choices in the app, because there were MANY, but I can say it was mostly done with the PhotoStudio app. I may have put a final, subtle vignette on at the end through CameraBag, but I can’t say for sure whether I did or not.

Here is the original photo. It is a picture of my finger covering half the shutter.

Then, I posterized it, highlighting only the brightest areas.

I liked that, but still wanted more detail, so I added a bump map texture.

The black area was just too black. While I liked the balance of space, I still thought for my purposes of demonstrating a picture of “art” I needed more. So I added a “grunge” feature.

While that did add detail to the black area, it also took away the color and made it sepia. I missed the color so tried to add some back.

It was still pretty boring, so I went into a “styles” menu and picked something fairly weird, that posterized the shapes into basic areas and added its own bulbous shapes to the edges.

Now we’re cookin’! I liked that. But I still felt it needed more texture, so I went in and added some water texture.

Nice! Looked primal, like lightning and energy. BUT, being an artist, I can’t leave well enough alone. I wondered what it would look like if I threw it through the Symmetry filter.

Awesome! But wait! There are still more filters I haven’t yet tried! How about a white vignette?

How about throwing it through another odd Styles filter?

Aaaaaand I like it. It’s time to stop playing and go to bed. I proclaim it done.

…. wait, no. Let’s try a few more variations.

Through a linocut filter. Interesting.

Same image, different color scheme.

I call this "AMERICA"

a question of art

Had some GREAT conversations tonight, mostly about art. Unfortunately it got too late to come home and write them. Here’s hoping the light of day doesn’t erase all my great thoughts from my memory, as it tends to do …

What Is Art?