Before And After, A Nameless Piece Of Art
Feb. 26th, 2020 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kerravonsenIn the spirit of keeping you folks more up to date, I hereby present a Nameless work which I finished today. I am Quite Pleased, even if I say so myself.
You probably will find it hard to believe, but THIS is the fluid art painting I started with:
I painted this in November last year.
And THIS is the result which I finished today (after much much much fiddling and tweaking and throwing things out):
Maybe I'll just call it something dull like "Celtic Star". I'd appreciate suggestions for a more interesting title!
A little about the process... I did not screencap myself working on this, I usually don't, because it would be hard to keep track, because I usually work on my digital art in bursts, not usually all at once, not unless I have a specific goal in mind, like "I'm going to do the Element Calcium"... and even then, I'm likely to put it aside for further tweaking. (I do have two digital-art-process videos in raw form, which I do intend to put up on my YouTube channel when I finally get around to editing them.)
When I'm doing an exploratory piece, I usually make several duplicate layers of the original, doing some standard effects on them: desaturation, white balance, colour inversion, value inversion... Whichever ones I don't like, I'll undo or delete. With this one, I kept the white-balance layer and the desaturated-and-white-balanced layer. I kept the desaturated layer on top, so as not to be distracted by the colours, but just looking at the light-and-dark. Then I figured that, since I'd been downloading a bunch of Celtic Knot clip art recently, I'd go with one of those as a base shape. Import the clip art, fill it white, set it to Difference. (Oh, the Difference filter is my most-used filter, I think, it is just So Interesting And Unpredictable.) Made various layers to give it a 3D effect. Thought I'd go for the same kind of effect I used in Trinity, which was done by making two layers of "ripples" out from the knot, filling them with Solid Noise, and setting them both to Difference. That gives a cool fade-in/fade-out effect.
Then I tried out lots of Difference layers underneath the "ripples" layers to change all the colours, it ended up being mostly green and pink and white.
Then I showed it to my friend JB, saying I was probably going to throw it away because it felt a bit "meh" to me, but she liked it, so that persuaded me to take another look at it. Fiddled with it a bit more, then thought "Why don't I turn it sideways?" So I transformed it with 90 degrees rotation... and then I realised that the drop-shadow looked odd, and, just as I was about to delete the drop shadow and do it again, I realised that the angle of the star looked odder. Because being a seven-pointed star, it looks unbalanced when it has just been rotated 90 degrees. So I decided to start again from scratch! With the same clip-art, but now oriented correctly for a Landscape image.
More layers for 3D effects. A slightly deeper drop-shadow. More "ripples" layers. This time I decided to put the colour filter Difference layer above the ripples layers, and I kept on changing my mind as to whether I would put the main Celtic-knot layer above or below the colour filter layer. I tried out So Many colour filter layers and was Not Happy with any of them. It was all too bright and garish. I was hankering for something more subtle, more like Celtic Inlay. Finally got something that made me think of icebergs, done with a pale blue gradient. Then I made the desaturated layer down below semi-transparent, so that a little colour from the original painting came through. This is an effect I like to do last; it adds just that little bit more variation in the colours, very subtle, without messing up the general composition.
And there you have it! Hope this was interesting for you.
You probably will find it hard to believe, but THIS is the fluid art painting I started with:
I painted this in November last year.
And THIS is the result which I finished today (after much much much fiddling and tweaking and throwing things out):
Maybe I'll just call it something dull like "Celtic Star". I'd appreciate suggestions for a more interesting title!
A little about the process... I did not screencap myself working on this, I usually don't, because it would be hard to keep track, because I usually work on my digital art in bursts, not usually all at once, not unless I have a specific goal in mind, like "I'm going to do the Element Calcium"... and even then, I'm likely to put it aside for further tweaking. (I do have two digital-art-process videos in raw form, which I do intend to put up on my YouTube channel when I finally get around to editing them.)
When I'm doing an exploratory piece, I usually make several duplicate layers of the original, doing some standard effects on them: desaturation, white balance, colour inversion, value inversion... Whichever ones I don't like, I'll undo or delete. With this one, I kept the white-balance layer and the desaturated-and-white-balanced layer. I kept the desaturated layer on top, so as not to be distracted by the colours, but just looking at the light-and-dark. Then I figured that, since I'd been downloading a bunch of Celtic Knot clip art recently, I'd go with one of those as a base shape. Import the clip art, fill it white, set it to Difference. (Oh, the Difference filter is my most-used filter, I think, it is just So Interesting And Unpredictable.) Made various layers to give it a 3D effect. Thought I'd go for the same kind of effect I used in Trinity, which was done by making two layers of "ripples" out from the knot, filling them with Solid Noise, and setting them both to Difference. That gives a cool fade-in/fade-out effect.
Then I tried out lots of Difference layers underneath the "ripples" layers to change all the colours, it ended up being mostly green and pink and white.
Then I showed it to my friend JB, saying I was probably going to throw it away because it felt a bit "meh" to me, but she liked it, so that persuaded me to take another look at it. Fiddled with it a bit more, then thought "Why don't I turn it sideways?" So I transformed it with 90 degrees rotation... and then I realised that the drop-shadow looked odd, and, just as I was about to delete the drop shadow and do it again, I realised that the angle of the star looked odder. Because being a seven-pointed star, it looks unbalanced when it has just been rotated 90 degrees. So I decided to start again from scratch! With the same clip-art, but now oriented correctly for a Landscape image.
More layers for 3D effects. A slightly deeper drop-shadow. More "ripples" layers. This time I decided to put the colour filter Difference layer above the ripples layers, and I kept on changing my mind as to whether I would put the main Celtic-knot layer above or below the colour filter layer. I tried out So Many colour filter layers and was Not Happy with any of them. It was all too bright and garish. I was hankering for something more subtle, more like Celtic Inlay. Finally got something that made me think of icebergs, done with a pale blue gradient. Then I made the desaturated layer down below semi-transparent, so that a little colour from the original painting came through. This is an effect I like to do last; it adds just that little bit more variation in the colours, very subtle, without messing up the general composition.
And there you have it! Hope this was interesting for you.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-26 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-06 08:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-26 11:21 pm (UTC)My cushions BTW are beautiful!
no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:03 am (UTC)Fair enough. I wasn't happy with the structure/composition of it, so I wanted to transform it into something different.
My cushions BTW are beautiful!
YAY!