This is a fun image for the holiday!! Hope you enjoy!! You will hear more tomorrow and hopefully have an image for 2 Things Challenge! Marcella, thank you for asking what program I used for these images. Studio Artist is a wicked fun program that swirls things all around very easily … and sometimes it feels out of control. But it is lots of fun! Here is a post with a demo of how it works if you are interested. Thank you!
Sometimes I have so much fun making new creations - this is one of those times … This again looks like a pattern for fabric or something … very lovely to me! This is using Studio Artists on an image that I have usage rights to (one of the so-called royalty-free images). I worked with an image and then changed the hue in Photoshop. It does definitely look textile to me. What do you think? What so you see?
Now for something I don’t think you’ve seen before. This came out of playing around with Studio Artist - a very fun computer art program. I had so much fun transforming a beautiful bird image into a horse of a different color. Hmmm … I bet Pet Monologues might think this could be an appropriate animal image for them. You are seeing this image because a friend wanted some of my ACEOs. She went through all my galleries and this is one of the ones she choose to want to have. Neither the Fanciful Animal Images or the bubblescapes are in those galleries. I need to make bubblescape galleries and the animals have their own galleries. I am delighted that such a fantastic artist wants my work - I will ask her if I can share one of her pieces with you sometime and point you to her website and Etsy shop.
The AWE (Artists Window Exhibit) Project is in just over a week. I have to get going on printing, matting and framing my work to be exhibited. Luckily Susan is fantastic at helping me with such things. (Particularly the framing which is the hardest for me). I need to take some steps to get that going or else I will be in trouble in a week. Please wish me luck!
Today I am feeling more connected to the Universe energetically - whew!! I feel like my body is made of light and energy (which we all are). To me this is a great indication that I have taken another step in healing!! Thank you for all your support, kindness and healing.
One thing that has been great for me in blogging is getting back into creating paintings again. I had gone on quite a digital image binge a couple of years ago and then slowed way down (except for animal pictures). I have not done that much new painting with traditional materials except for working on a couple of series that I knew I wanted to work out to four in each series. And I have spent a lot of time marketing and doing graphic design and web design for clients.
Coming here and having you want a new painting every day, I worried if I would have enough. I am sure I had enough for maybe a year (or 2 depending on what I use), but I am very conservative in a certain way (not politically), and I didn’t want to use up all my paintings.
So I started creating new digital ones to hopefully delight you. And it has been great - because you have helped me go past what I was doing before in working with Studio Artist. In Photoshop I am probably working very much similarly. But your comments have pushed me past where I was working with SA. To a bunch more steps and taking images and working and reworking and reworking again.
Then - about the names - you pushed me to get more creative when I was going on and on with the Beyonds - since I was working with the same base image. That was how I was naming before - using one name for all 4 or so images I would make from one source image.
Right now I have over 300 images in a folder from one painting. Almost all the images I have created the last couple of months have been from the one base painting. So, obviously, Beyond 301 doesn’t cut it.
The Confession - for my Blog Action Day painting, I want to use traditional mediums - which means physical paints, physical collages, physical pastels, etc. Now … here is the confession really - I am scared! I feel I can never do anything worthwhile and that it just won’t look that good … and I can’t do it. I am nervous to so this!
The Appreciation - I want to thank you all for helping me develop into another stage in digital painting and also naming of paintings. Having to come up with a new name every day has made it much easier to be creative in names.
Thank you for sharing my process and please feel free to share yours!
It is delightful that we are talking with each other about these issues of creativity and supporting each other as artists. For me, it is much different doing things digitally than with paper or canvas and paint. Lately I have been sitting down with an image and just saying - “go ahead and change it.”
First, actually I cruise a bunch of images and see who speaks to me. Someone jumps out and yells, “me, me me!” So I say, “OK.” I don’t have anything in mind … I work from the process before me with the Studio Artist program. That is how I have made most of these images lately … and often gone into Photoshop for while too.
It is much scarier for me with paper and paint. Though I used a similar technique for using paper and tempera for awhile and 2 of those images are very popular ones of mine. With paint I feel I have to create something “special” to justify using resources and stuff .. so it is much harder to create.
Also, with paint and paper or canvas, sometimes I do sit down with a specific idea - like to create another image in a series. Allowing myself to play obviously works much better. And I absolutely agree with Sue - don’t worry too much about being original.
Start with something that you want to do and constantly stretch yourself. Hard as it is, try to compare yourself to you - not to anyone else. Though that is easier to say than to do! I know! What else are you thinking?
Rima Koleilat has issued another challenge for anyone to play the game of changing an image. Details are here. So I have taken up playing this game too. Here is my first image - with a tip of the hat to Aldous Huxley (who wrote “Doors of Perception”).
Part of the game is sharing how you got from the original (see Rima’s post) to the final image. I decided to start out in Studio Artist. As before, I started with Translating the image - which moves it in the direction you pull and then doubles as one moves. Because I wanted to keep a sense of realism, while adding mystery and a sense of otherworldliness at the same time, I only pulled in one direction at a time.
After pulling left to right horizontally, I Translated downward vertically. I wanted to continue this process but as I tried it, I was losing the main elements of the image that I wanted to keep. So I used Scale Uniform to just make everything smaller to give me room to fool around.
Then I Translated from right to left to double the door and and Translated from top to bottom to add to the upper stories. After that, I Translated from bottom to top to double the shop and doors to deepen the sense of mystery established with the doubled sign on the shop awning.
I wanted to differentiate the bottom shop and doors from the top to make it look like a reflection. I made a selection in Studio Artist to choose just the bottom reflections and was struck by the striking nature of the inverse color that showed up as I was highlighting it.
I couldn’t figure out how to make things work from there in Studio Artist so I switched to Photoshop since I know certain things much better in that program. Again, I choose just the bottom reflection and tried a few things like watercolor filters and such. But that inverse color was stuck in my mind. So I did a simple inverting the color in the reflection part.
There is an article that I have written about “Art that Changed Me” - it is the topic of the current and next issue of the People’s Voice which is a local newsletter of which I am the editor. There wasn’t room for me in the current issue so we are going to run the topic again. It is now quarterly - it used to be monthly and was way too much work! In that article, I talk about how the reflective surfaces of the bathroom window sills and bathtub walls of my childhood impacted my perception and expanded my viewpoint. This image reminds me of the mirroring wall quality.
Colors on computer are so complex and just plain weird. Tonight I have used this image in 4 different programs. I created the image in Studio Artist, added an adjustment layer in Adobe Photoshop to change the hue, looked at this and several other versions in Adobe Bridge and then finally working on this post in Firefox.
The reddish/orange hue in the Bridge looked very very orange and extremely elegant! Then when I was resizing it in Photoshop, all of a sudden it looks much pinker than orange. Hence the name “coral.”
I remember looking at a post in Lisa Call’s quilting blog and she was writing about being very distressed because the color didn’t come out right on a photograph she was putting on the web. I think I must have had 2 browsers open - Firefox and also Safari - probably to look at the image and post in one browser and comment in the other. The color difference was amazing - like 2 different pieces. So I am not going to be in too much angst right now over this color difference.
In the comments to this post a few days ago Chris made an anoucement about changes he is going to make in his art marketing blog. You might want to check out these comments and definitely check out his blog as he makes these changes. I will point you to his blog as he does make this change.
Thank you again for all your support and encouragement!
I am going through my email box today to try to deal with stuff or file it away. It is boiling hot and sticky. But I am making progress. I just signed up with My Space to be able to download a file on how to effectively use My Space. I can’t figure out much yet, but here is the adress …. I know it will shock you … http://myspace.com/dianeclancy. One step at a time for learning these new things!
I have been working the last couple of days on making the pdf file for the Studio Artist Demo. I naively thought I could just copy and paste it from the post to a pdf file. Many hours later, I know think it is not so simple.
I asked for help on the technical details from the local Hidden-Tech group and the number of responses and suggestions has been amazing! It is a local email (probably offline group too) of people working in small businesses for ourselves. I think almost (if not all) everyone is in the Creative Economy. It is so great the way people help each other. I know when a question whizzes by my eye that I think I can answer, I jump right in there to be part of the solutions. Very cool what we are all doing to help each other in this new interconnected world.
Of course, after I get this ready, then I need to figure out how to use the newsletter function at my host. All the marketing advice talks about giving away something in exchange for someone’s email address. I think I am going to have a nice product to give away.
Here are my current entries for Rima’s challenge. You can see the deatils of the challenge on her blog on this post. You can also see some other people’s entries in the posts after this one. here is the original image to work on. You can see more details on how to use Studio Artist on this post on my blog.
Lily Pad
This painting is done in Studio Artist using warp translate and rotate tools quite a few times.
Then it became time to try a different method. I decided to move to Photoshop and see what to do there … I actually made “Night Light Lily” before I made this painting. This is an exclusion layer over the Night Light Lily. I copied the layer several times and the top layer is exclusion mode is on the top.
Saturation mode creates this Night Light Lily. I made several more variations of this but got tired of prepping them for the web … so this was great fun!
I tried a whole bunch of filter in both Photoshop and Digital Studio and I don’t know how I got these next two paintings. So sorry … I didn’t follow the rules.
This is the Studio Artist demo that some of you have been asking me to create. This is a 22 step creation of a digital painting in Studio Artist to show you a demonstration of how to use this innovative art program. I have decided to use the same size images I usually use. I want to give you a better flow than I think you will get from going back and forth between thumbnails and enlargements. But for the workspace and the final image I am providing the thumbnails so you can look at the enlargement if you want. Of course any of the other enlargements are available on request.
This is what the workspace looks like. Here is a screen shot of the program after I have already done some steps so you can see which part of the workspace is the source image and which is the canvas. Studio Artist always has a source image, but there are many ways to use this source image including use of the colors, the image to manipulate and not at all.
Workspace
I am putting in a thumbnail that you can look at full size in case you want to see more of a closeup of the controls of the program. This is the identical image but it will blow up larger.
I use the acrylic painting “Fire and Air” (that I have been using for the series of digital paintings in posts the last couple of weeks) for the source image. I bring the source image onto the canvas to start this creative process. In other words, I tell the program to place this image on to the working canvas so that I may begin to manipulate this image.
Then using the “interactive warp” operation with the “translate” tool (as opposed to the “translate local” tool), I grab the curvaceous yellow curve in the upper right hand corner and pull the image a little down and to the left. You can see the reflecting, both vertically and horizontally, of the yellow curve. If I had dragged in only one direction, it would have reflected in only that direction.
Using the same tool I again grab the upper right hand corner with the yellow curves and drag them a little to the left and substantially down. Notice that the doubled curve doubled again. If I had originally kept dragging, it would not have doubled again. Each time I stop, the whole operation starts anew with the new resulting image. Notice the way we have pretty much lost the green. But the striped reefs (I think someone called them) have also expanded and doubled.
Looks like I then repeat the process … I couldn’t duplicate it. There are many subtle decisions – just like in traditional painting – that are hard to exactly duplicate. (At least for me.) Fortuitous happenings happen here too.
I translate this image again moving to the right and upward, this time to try to bring more of the stripped reef back in. The yellow curves got a little dominating so I wanted to bring back more contrast. In the process the little pieces of the reef at the top and bottom left get more substance.
Using the interactive warp operation with the “rotate” tool (as opposed to the “rotate local,” “rotate scale,” or “rotate3symmetry” tools), I grab the reef and work to keep it prominent but at a tilt.
Then I rotate it again to give it more tilt since many of you like that off-symmetry. Now we move to a different kind of technique. The new base canvas has basically been set up for more of a dissimilar kind of movement.
I use the interactive warp operation of “sphere” (as opposed to “sphere1” or “sphere2”). If you look to the center and then a little up and to the right, you will see this swirl … or umbrella as it has been called. This is where doing a video would be very effective.
All these tools are “interactive” – you can use them and create and see changes in real time. These spheres are something else though – they are gorgeous in the way they move and ebb and flow, right before your very eyes. But if I stop to take a screen shot, then I cannot get back the same image. It is extremely interactive – it is not sequential, but live time!
For the next few shots I go in for close-ups to try to give the feel of the fluidity. We are working near the center, near the first sphere. This tool of the interactive warp operation is “sphere2.” I make a move with the tool, take a screen shot and repeat the process a couple of times to show you the movement.
I make another shape or umbrella with sphere 2 near the left edge of the image, just over halfway up. To me it is starting to look like a street scene as someone mentioned about another painting.
Then there is another swirl (technically named “sphere”) or umbrella, basically between these last 2 spheres and down a little. That’s starting to look like a street corner to me.
Going back to the top of this painting, I use the interactive warp operation with the sphere1 tool to create another movement there on the left. With all of these sphere tools, there is an incredible amount of interactivity while using these tools. I wouldn’t call it a lot of control, but certainly a lot of choice and possibility!
I rotate the whole image again a little to the left and up to get more movement in the painting. It breaks up the upper right hand corner that I think was a little too static and adds some interest to the bottom left corner.
I decide another umbrella is needed near the bottom right corner. This is sphere2 that creates the “eye” looking spheres. The sphere tool creates translucent looking spheres and sphere2 creates more circular, more regular spheres.
One last umbrella is created above and slightly to the right of the last umbrella. It is odd - things start out as shapes for me and then become specific things as I keep playing with a painting. This happens in both traditional and digital medium paintings.
OK - now that we have created this painting, we still have to name it. Some ideas I have are Streetscape I (because surely there will be more like this), Umbrellas in the Rain, Looking Down from Floor 25, Theater Square … do you have any to add?
Using this program is like using any creative tool. Each little step can look obvious and manageable, but each step involves choice and techniques. If you start with the same tools, similar ideas, the same source image, you will get a different result than I will. This is because we each bring all our vision and experience to bear on each decision we make - including the artistic ones.
First off, am I to assume the thumbnails work for the Studio Artist demo?
Rima Koleilat of MaraZine blog (marayagalleries.blogspot.com) has issued a digital challenge in this post here. Rima is asking anyone interested to download the same digital image and make an painting with it. You can download it from this post, here on my blog … then the thumbnail will expand and you can download the file. There are a few simple rules you can read in Rima’s post - and a deadline!! I am joining in with the fun and I hope you will too. Anyone may play!
Rima adds about this challenge “It would be nice to have more people try their hand at interpreting the same picture, with varying degrees of know-how. I think for a lot of our readers and fellow bloggers, it would be a little push in a different direction - always good for creativity muscles. ” Sue, I can’t wait to see the mandala you make - though you can make another picture too.
Lily Pad for Rima’s Challenge
Rima also wrote in a comment on this blog,”I do enjoy your “unsymmetrical” work, I find it more expressive of your gentleness.” I asked Rima for elaboration to better understand what she is meaning. This is what Rima answered, “I like all of your work, but I do like the “looser” designs most: like “Expansion” (it blew my mind, I loved that one) - very profound, and pieces like “In the Garden” with the Buddha in the flowers ) - so gentle and beautiful.”
Rima continues, “In the more “designy” series, works like in these posts: Castles in the Air and Can this be a Circus (my “umbrellas”!) still have some symmetry … but … it’s like you decided to play instead of painting, and the result is more energetic.”
With these thoughts in mind, I decided to push to go to a different place with Studio Artist today to create a painting for this post. When I have an actual paint brush in my hand, unless I am using masking tape for the straight edge “Luminous Angles” series, you probably never see a really straight line. But the way I have been using this program, I am generating lots and lots of straight lines. It is a little funny, odd funny. Here is one the Luminous Angles, “Dance of Life” if you want to check it out.
But, then again, Rima is really talking about symmetry rather than straight lines. And I guess it is symmetry rather than straight lines that Studio Artist generates so easily with the tools I have been using lately. So funny, Rima says symmetry and I hear straight lines. I will have to think why that is. I was going to edit out a chunk of my writing once I realized that straight lines were never even being mentioned, but I thought it might be interesting to follow where and how my mind travels.
Giving me lots to think about as I create. Thank you so much, Rima, for taking the time to think and write about my work!! But the best news is … I have been creating lots of new work lately! And one big reason I have been painting digitally is to show you some ideas. So, a big thank you!!
What do you think of this? Also, below, I have put one thumbnail to test if this is going to work for the Studio Artist demo I have prepared. Is this big enough? I randomly gave you “Step 6″ as a preview.
I don’t feel well too well again so I am going to keep this very brief. Instead I caught up on reading and posting on your blogs today. All the business cards are coming on Tuesday - I am very excited. Those who wanted real life copies, please email me your name and address. Thank you again for being in my life!
That kitty with the blue whiskers is at the controls again! Green leaves, structure, pillars, yellow and blue, deep blue sky, Star Wars faces, green bow-tie, the mothership is landing, bridges over the river, towers into the sky, arms embracing, reefs, fish, divers, theater, curtains, masks … what do you see, think or feel?
I have created a 22 step demonstration of Studio Artist. I have written the text and also prepared the images. So you WILL see it very soon! There will be a total of 24 images with the post … so hopefully, I can use thumbnails and have you able to go bigger if you want to look at some them more closely. I am pretty excited!
Just got back home … going to bed. Our muffler started dragging on the highway and we pulled over. Eventually an angel came by and helped us! He got off the next exit and came all the way around again to help us!! He was a kind young man who went under the car with a chain and tied up the muffler to we could get home. We are both VERY grateful!
Starry night, gift of the soul, delicacy, feminine, northern lights, pac woman (see, that’s different!), matrix of healing and light above the earth, lightening, electricity, macro level, micro level, cell synapses, molecules, dna chains, fluid, cell nucleus, chains of life, chains of love, the mothership in space, ramping up to warp speed, Ukrainian decorated egg … What do you see? Any thoughts or feelings?
Wow! What fantastic comments everyone has made! They all came to my email box today and it was better than Christmas!! I agree these images need names and not numbers. For me it worked ok with Beyond I and II - the original ones … but all this experimentation without real names is confusing to me too! But I thought they were better than what I have the originals stored as “Fire and Air.tif-proc50″ and such. The store is officially open for any name suggestions of any of this series!
This all started out just to share more with you about how Studio Artist works. By the way, once I rename them, do I go back and change the names in the posts ~ or not? This is more of this stuff about life where if you do stuff right at the beginning it is easier! Who said life and art were pretty much the same? (oh, right, me anyway)
Great idea to put them all together! Such fun to hear about figures and images in these paintings! I like African. Rima says, ” I do enjoy your “unsymetrical” work, I find it more expressive of your gentleness.” - I would never have thought of things that way … more to think about ~ I sure would like to hear more about that! (I will link to your blog another time, Rima, but with limited access, too challenging - but write more about it and in 2 days I will have good access again.)
So, it sounds like these might be worth naming and saving? I was just playing .. but often some of my good work comes from play. I like to have an idea and try it in different ways … and see where it goes.
Diane Clancy creates vibrant paintings that feature color and vision to inspire and uplift people. Says Diane, "I feel very blessed to have this opportunity to express myself through painting. I love that people say my artwork enhances their lives."
Diane belongs to Worldwide Women Artists Online, an international collective of women artists showing and selling our work online. For more original art direct from the women who create it, search WWAO.
Diane Clancy creates vibrant paintings that feature color and vision to inspire and uplift people. Says Diane, "I feel very blessed to have this opportunity to express myself through painting. I love that people say my artwork enhances their lives."
