I am being inspired by Sue O’Kieffe’s mandalas to share this digital painting with you today. Sue’s mandalas are very different from this, but tonight after looking at her blog, Sacred Circle Mandalas, the vibrancy in her latest mandala sent me searching for a similar “feel” in my own work.

Nature Reflections II, Digital © Diane Clancy

This image was created in Studio Artist (SA) from a pretty photograph of yellow and blue birds. This program specializes in transformation of images. If you would like to see another variation made from the same photograph, you can check out post Nature Reflections I. There you can find the start of the following conversation.

I have been asked the difference between SA and Photoshop. SA is vector based, like Illustrator, rather than bitmap or pixel based like Photoshop. In a vector based program, one can make a circle and it is determined by a mathematical formula. If one enlarges it to as big as a house, it is still a perfect circle since it is created by a formula or vector.

With a bitmap image, when one increases the size, the circle will get ragged because it is based on a certain number of little squares next to each other. When one makes those squares bigger, all the jagged edges of the squares are more obvious. Truly the circle never was a circle, but a circle drawn by squares.

More about this another day … I love the vibrancy of the colors – especially the purple.

– Diane Clancy

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