Digital Art - 9/24/14: "Gaillardia Arrangement in Space and Time"

NF Photography alternates an Abstract Art prompt with a Digital Art prompt.
Scroll to the very bottom of this post to see this week's Digital Art composition: "Gaillardia Arrangement in Space and Time."

I just spent several weeks in Portland, Maine.  I took over 1500 photos of the city, the harbor, charming old houses (most built in the 1800's)  You can find some of those (more will be added in the future) and many of my other images on my Flickr page.  View my entire photostream or click on "albums" to the right of my profile image to view a specific set of images. 

There is an album titled "Maine."  The one called "Art from My Photos" contains images that may have been posted for this meme ---or will be posted in the future.

Click on any individual photo for a larger view, then scroll down a little to find more info about that image.

Addendum, 10/4/14: I have chosen the image at the bottom of this post ("Gaillardia Arrangement in Space and Time" as my choice for my Photo/Heart Connection. This is an image that took many hours to complete. I was in new territory (for me) here and had to experiment to figure out how to make my image look as I imagined it. When enough time and effort is put into something and one is pleased with the result, it becomes dear to one's own heart.
Scroll to the bottom to see my result.

This week's Digital art image and where I found my inspiration:
Although most artists want to develop their own style, we are all consciously or unconsciously influenced by other artists. When I see something I find unique or interesting, I might borrow an idea, but I try to change it to become my own.

In July I attended an artist talk and photo exhibit opening at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Artist Corey Escoto uses innovative methods to create his photos, but I caught only about 15% of what he said because he didn't project his voice, mumbled, and faced away from the microphone when referring the slides on the screen behind him.

I liked his basic idea, though. He uses old Polaroid technology. He creates black stencils to mask parts of the Polaroid film, exposes the unmasked areas, then uses other stencils to expose or hide additional areas, creating compositions with numerous exposures. He presented some of those framed photos in his exhibit along with sculptures he created using mounted photos to create 3-D houses of cards, to cover the sides of pedestals, and combine photos with an assortment of materials to create 3-D works. I liked some of his work. Other items left me cold.

 Here is a small sampling of Escoto's work, 3 photos and 2 sculptures. (click on any image for a larger view.)




I especially liked how he created images that almost appeared to be mounted photos arranged to create the appearance of 3-D space in the 2nd image above.  I decided to attempt to create something similar myself. I, however, didn't use Escoto's Polaroid technique, but created mine digitally.

I cropped the photo to create a
square image.

"Gaillardia Mix"
Using several photos of the gaillardia in my
garden, I began by creating this digital
composition in Photoshop.

 

"Gaillardia Arrangement in Space and Time"

Finally, I created this digital art composition to give it the appearance
of mounted photos in a 3-D arrangement. In addition to using principles
of perspective, I made the images at the back slightly smaller, darker, and 
with less contrast and saturation to add to the appearance of depth.

This took about 5 hours to create.  I had to redo some of the images several
times before I was satisfied.  The one good thing about creating
a symmetrical arrangement was that once I was pleased with an image
on the left, I was able to duplicate and flip it horizontally to add the
same image on the right.