Geometric Friday - 12/19/14: Court Abstracts

Geometric Friday hosted by LorikArt 

Click on the links above to view posts by other artists/photographers or to participate yourself.

SINCE THE NEXT 2 WEEKS ARE HOLIDAY WEEKS,
I'LL SEE EVERYONE BACK HERE ON 1/9/15.


I am like Alex Trebek who said,  "I'm curious about everything, even things that don't interest me."

I have almost ZERO interest in sports, but that doesn't mean I can't see the possibilities of using the designs on an outdoor basketball court to create some art. Since a basketball court is rectangular and has lines dividing it into more rectangles or semicircles, and since this one had several different colors and patterns on it, I thought it would be great for Geometric Friday.

I started out with about a dozen photos, but chose 6 of them. I arranged them in various ways.

The first composition is one of the images I started with. There are quite a few versions, but this gives you the idea of where I began by taking parts of several photos and overlapping them. This image shows the actual colors of the court.

CLICK ON ANY IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEWS OF ALL.

Below are 7 of the 14 images I created using various combinations of images from the basketball court. Some have the same composition but different colors or textures. Others are somewhat different from the others. But they all started at one outdoor basketball court at a local park.

I rotated, flipped, scaled, overlapped various parts. I colored them with color overlays, added textures,  and made some layers transparent.

 I like different ones for different reasons.

Which is your favorite and why?

"Court Abstract" version B2

"Court Abstract" version D3

"Court Abstract" version E

"Court Abstract" version F

"Court Abstract" version F2

"Court Abstract" version H

"Court Abstract" version H2

Digital Art - 12/17/14: "Winter Tree"

The Digital Art meme hosted by Natures Footstep memes   now includes what was formerly the Abstract Photo meme.

Click on the links above to view the posts by other artists/photographers or to participate yourself.

SINCE THE NEXT 2 WEEKS ARE HOLIDAY WEEKS,
I'LL SEE EVERYONE BACK HERE ON 1/7/15.

"Winter Tree"

Original photo

See my photostream on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cj_proartz
Below my name, click on albums to find a particular type of photo (Black and White, Fences, Abstracts, Landscapes, Still Life, Autumn Scenes, Bridges, Animals, Art Created from My Photos, etc.)

Digital Art & Geometric Friday - 12/10 & 12/12/14: "Iron Oxide"

The Digital Art meme hosted by Natures Footstep memes   now includes what was formerly the Abstract Photo meme.

Geometric Friday hosted by LorikArt 

Click on the links above to view posts by other artists/photographers or to participate yourself.


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In August, I was called for jury duty. Once they picked all the jurors they needed, everyone else was dismissed around noon.  I have been called 6 times for jury duty and served 4 times, so I was not disappointed to be released.

I was not allowed to take my camera into the jury selection rooms, so I had locked my camera in the car, just in case I'd have time to take photos during a lunch break or after being dismissed for the day.

Butler (PA) was once home to several large industries. It was a wealthy town and has many beautiful buildings left from that era, including an impressive courthouse (in a photo at the bottom of this post.)  But the town has lost most of its large businesses, so there are also some run-down scenes in the city.  I like taking photos of both.

Once I retrieved my camera from my car, the first photos I took were in the parking garage.

Original photo:
taken in a parking garage in Butler, PA

For my abstract image, I used parts of this image and several others. I overlapped them and added a photo overlay with an image I had of rust, to add color and texture. I repeated the hexagon shapes to balance the composition and purposely left the parking meters (on the left) somewhat recognizable.

During one of my steps some blues and purples appeared, so I added more of those for variety and to balance the colors, and finally intensified all the colors.

The title "Iron Oxide" is the scientific term for rust.

"Iron Oxide"
I used the photo above and several other photos I took in the Butler, PA parking garage.

Butler County (PA) Courthouse,
built in 1885,
is on the National register of
Historic Places.

See my photostream on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cj_proartz
Below my name, click on albums to find a particular type of photo (Black and White, Fences, Abstracts, Landscapes, Still Life, Autumn Scenes, Bridges, Animals, Art Created from My Photos, etc.)

Digital Art - 12/3/14: Blending Into the Furniture

The Digital Art meme hosted by Natures Footstep memes now includes what was formerly the Abstract Photo meme.

Click on the links above to view the posts by other artists/photographers or to participate yourself.
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I usually create and set up my images for this meme weeks in advance, so I rarely use the suggested-but-optional, theme for the week. But this week's theme was to include a woman and I had just created several images that included women for several weekly challenges on the "Digitalmania" group on Flickr.

That group suggests doing something in the style of a particular artist or using a particular type of image each week, so each of these is very different.

So far, I have posted only three to that group and all three included images of women.

CLICK ON ANY IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEWS OF ALL.

"Technicolor Mindbender"

#1.  This challenge was to create something inspired by artist Alberto Seveso who uses digital art to alter faces and bodies by adding flowers and other bits and pieces to produce ethereal images. Seveso's work can be found here: burdu976.com/

I had a few face photos, but I had never had anyone sign waivers for me to use them.  So I took the eyes from one face, the nose from another, hair from two others, and took a few parts from online images and blended them into one face that looks nothing like any of the ones I used to create it.

I decided to add snowflakes I had made at snowdays.me ---where anyone can digitally cut your own snowflakes.  TRY IT! IT'S FUN!  You can create your flakes and then email them to yourself or download them.

I had about 70 to choose from. Most were white, but I had colored a few in Photoshop. I used one for the entire image, another for the forehead and neck and another for the cheeks.  I didn't intend them to look like snowflakes, but rather like radial designs or perhaps mandalas.

When I added the snowflake over the entire face, it looked like rays radiating from her forehead. That, along with the staring eyes, gave me the idea for the title.

Snowflake used over entire image above.
Digitally cut at Snowdays website---see link above.
I like to make my snowflakes very detailed
and complicated 

#2. The next challenge was to use the face of silent film actress Maude Fealy in an image.  

I used a photo of Maude Fealy that I assume is in the public domain. I used the perspective and scale tools to make it look like a film screen and added thin lines & spots to make it resemble old film grain. The filmstrips were created in Photoshop. I found a photo of an old projector online and used it as a model to "draw" my own in Photoshop and then added a triangle of light with feathered edges to look like the light of a projector.

"Silent Film"

#3. The next challenge was to design something inspired by artist Duy Huynh, a surrealist painter whose work is very playful. Samples of his art can be found here: duyhuynh.com/

"Dora Just Wanted to Blend
Into the Furniture"

What I honed in on was not the artist's whimsical style, but the visual puns he created, reflected by the wordplay of some of his titles. 

For example, a painting called "Between the Stars and Stripes" pictures an acrobat on the back of a zebra against a night sky. Another called "Poetreehouse" shows a treehouse made of (poetry?) books. "Uplifting Melody" depicts a woman holding an old-fashioned record player being lifted from the ground by balloons. Imagine what he created for "Stowaway on a Train of Thought."

I looked at idiomatic phrases online, selected a few, thought about them for a few days and decided to use the idea of literally "blending into the furniture."

This one is definitely best viewed in a larger size to see the details. For example, I used the woodwork on the couch to create her hair. I added a claw foot to the couch and used it to create her hands and feet. Obviously the dress and shoes were made by  cloning the upholstery fabric and her dress in the frame was cloned from the wall paper.

This one took me much longer to create than the other two combined, but it was definitely the most fun.