I know the titles are cheesy but I couldn’t think of anything that fit this new photo/digital art any better as I created it late at night. Perhaps I’ll re-title it “Art Rocks!” or something…any suggestions?
I haven’t played with Photoshop Elements for a while and I am not quite sure what even inspired me to start this evening but once I started I couldn’t stop with just one image! I started on the first image using this photo.
I have many, many rock images that I have taken during my travels over the past year or so…I’m just drawn to them, their texture, colors, the lighting, I can’t help myself! Anyhow, I opened up a blank layer on top of this image and then began to draw outlines and trace details of it with a fairly wide (about 40 pixels) paint brush, using black to make the marks with. After I’d done all that I made a duplicate copy of the original image and then softened it up quite a bit with a blur tool and layered it on top of the original. From there I ended up making two duplicates of the blurred image and made different adjustments to them using the gradient map. Then each of those layers were adjusted for opacity & blending techniques. Clear as mud? I don’t want to bore anyone but I also know that other Elements users always ask “how’d you do that?” so I’m trying to give them a brief explanation without boring the rest of you to tears. 🙂 The last couple of steps involved selecting the black marks on the top layer and reducing the size of the lines (using the “modify” and “contract” options) till they were much thinner. I also added a duplicate layer of that image and inversed the color (black to white or white to black) and did a very slight blur to give a highlight to the lines. Okay…enough tech talk, here is the first result:
It’s pretty easy to see the similarities between the original photo and the new images. The following one is a little more abstract, here are the “before” and “after” images for it:
- “rock my world #2” photo/digital art (c) 2011, Lynne Medsker
The last creation for the day is at the top of the page and I think it is probably my favorite one of the three. The photo it was from is this one:
I’ve got a selection of other photos that I want to work on soon, I’m enjoying a little digital play, it’s been a while! I hope you enjoy me mixing the post topics up front time to time…I don’t want anyone to get bored when they stop by to read!
Back soon with something new,
Lynne
A Randomly Creative Blog 