Digital Art & Geometric Friday - 11/19 & 11/21/14: "Circles 2"

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The Digital Art meme now includes what was formerly the Abstract Photo meme.

Geometric Friday hosted by LorikArt 

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Do you know the difference between "pixilated" and "pixelated" ???
See below the image for the answer.


I created today's image in Photoshop without using any of my photos.  

I started by making one design using circles & patterns inside of a large circle.

I then copied that design, placed in on a new layer and made it smaller. I rotated it so it would look different than the one below. I did that two more times ---except I mistakenly left the top layer turned in the same direction as the one under it.
But that's OK.  It makes little difference.

Then I changed the alternating layers to have more or less saturated colors so it was easy to distinguish between them. 

I added a background texture with tiny circles and used the colors from the rest of the design on color overlays over the background. 

"Circles 2"

Pixelated, with an e?

If you are a computer user, you probably know that a pixel is a tiny area on a display screen. It is derived from "pix" which is an abbreviation for picture element. When an image is enlarged to the point that one can see individual pixels, we say the image is pixelated.

Pixilated, with an i? 

That needs a longer explanation. I learn something new almost every day.  One day last week, I learned 2 new things.

I had never seen "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" until last week when it ran on GetTV.  It's a Capra feel-good film in the same vein as "You Can't Take it With You," "It Happened One Night," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and "It's a Wonderful Life," but I loved this film more than those others. It stars Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur ---and if you haven't seen it, it's well-worth watching.

Gary Cooper plays Longfellow Deeds who lives on a farm in Vermont and inherits $20 million from an uncle during The Great Depression.  Eventually he is accused of being too insane to handle the money. At his hearing, two older women from his hometown testify that Longfellow is "pixilated."  My ears perked up because I had never heard that term to mean anything but "pixelated" with an e and certainly never heard it before the computer age.  (I had to do a little research to find the correct spelling of the original pixilated.)

I thought perhaps pixelated with an e came from pixilated with an i, but in my research, I found only one dubious claim that it was.

Pixilated's origins are from the 19th century. It is a form of "pixie-led" meaning led astray by pixies, which came to mean confused or crazy.

In my research, I also learned that the word "doodle" was used for the first time in the same movie to mean scribble absentmindedly.  Originally doodle came from a 17th century German verb meaning to make a fool of or to cheat.  Apparently either the writers or Capra coined the new use of the word, in the sense we know it today, for "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town."

See hundreds of my photos and art images on my Flickr pages.