I am the Kat that Walks By Itself

In 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:
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And THIS is the result which I finished today (after much much much fiddling and tweaking and throwing things out):
( cut for image )
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.

I can't remember where I saw it, but someone I know linked to an article criticising Etsy for deluding people into thinking they could make a living out of craft. Actually, I think it was a link in an article that was criticising the original article, but I can't find either one. Never mind. Suffice to say, this has sparked some thinks in me.
( Art: it's cheaper than therapy )