Daily Art Post July 18, 2011

Summertime! banner created with InDesign and Photoshop CS4

      Today I played with a photograph I took of some of my Dianthus flowers last summer. I wanted to make a banner in Adobe InDesign, so I started with the flowers, since I wanted to create letters with the Dianthus image as the "color" of the text. I am posting the process in backward order just to be difficult.

The InDesign piece before I imported it to Photoshop

     The very top banner is the finished banner, cropped in Photoshop and with two borders added, also in Photoshop.

Filters: Paint Daub, Posterize, Cutout

 
   
     The second image is the "Summertime!" lettering
and background created in InDesign. I converted the type to outlines so I could put the Dianthus image into it. After I added a fun yellow stroke detail to the letters, I added the bright and sunny yellow background. I saved as I went along, nothing like losing all your work because the program quit, which has happened before, maddening is putting it mildly. After I saved it as an InDesign file, I exported it as a JPEG file. I closed out of InDesign and then opened up Photoshop! I wish I had CS5 or CS5.5, but I am still very happy with what I can do using CS4.      

Filter order: Paint Daub, Posterized

   

     Photoshop filters are so much fun, I could spend hours playing with them and never getting off just one image, they are addictive! I started with the first
Dianthus image at the bottom of my post here. I
cropped it and then adjusted the red color intensity and it created this cool rainbow effect. I think I used the "paint daub" filter after that, which softened it all up, but might have been another filter, I forgot already, big surprise. I really liked the softened rainbow look a lot and will probably do something else with it later, maybe use it in a ATC.       

Red hue adjusted all the way to the right

     Once I had the softened painterly image, I decided it needed a bit more of an edge,

so I used the "posterize" filter. It added a black edge and made the flowers "pop" a bit more. You can see that it also darkened the image, which is more of what I wanted to use to fill in my lettering. If you click on the photo, you will see a larger image with more detail. After using the posterize filter, I decided to use one last filter to take a little bit of the edge off the posterizing results. I chose the "Cutout" filter, which simplifies the image. It did cause the loss of the rainbow effect that I liked so much, but I decided I was happier with the cutout filter effect and that is what I went with.

My original photograph

     My last steps were to save the image as a JPEG file and then

"Place" it into the InDesign file I had already started. I selected it and "cut" it from the place where I had placed it and then selected the lettering outlines and selected "Place into." I moved the image around and resized it a few times to get it right where I wanted it.
     Let me just say (not again!), creating art everyday is more time consuming than I thought it would be, I am not meeting my own personal quota of one piece everyday. But I feel wonderful every time I create something new, especially when I get a chance to use those programs I spent so much time learning over the last two years in school. It makes me happy. Really happy.
     So if you are itching to make something yourself, anything at all, I have just one thing to tell you..."do it!"

Daily Art Post July 16, 2011

Mushroom House pencil sketch B

     Again, a bit behind on the art posting. I'm not going to throw out any excuses though, just going to post a couple images of my "Mushroom Houses." I love to draw these for some strange reason. One of my Flash animation projects included a mushroom house I drew and then brought to life. I love miniature things, I always have. I know kids love miniature things, mine always did. My son liked micro machines, those tiny little cars and my daughters both like the Polly Pocket and Littlest Petshop toys. I have never outgrown my fascination for miniature things, and I can actually remember when my fascination began, believe it or not. I was pretty young, maybe seven or eight years old. I saw an episode of "Land of the Giants," and was so taken with it, I dreamed of having little people to "play" with for a long time after that.

Mushroom House pencil sketch A

     Maybe that seems strange, but ever since then, I have loved the idea of little houses and little people. There was also a series of books illustrated by Cyndy Szekeres, with small animals that lived in homes that included cast off things from the world of people. Anyway, I have made miniature fairy cottage beads, "dress" beads and many other miniature things out of glass as well. You would think that with my love of all things small I would be into doll houses and all that, but I am not. I appreciate them, but I think I like the idea of making the small things myself instead of buying them already made with perfect details. I'm funny like that, ha ha.

Fairy Cottage Lampwork glass bead

    I am also posting one of the fairy cottage beads I made a couple years ago, long sold on Etsy as well as some of my mushroom houses created with Illustrator and Photoshop, both CS4 for my Flash animation class last fall. Notice that one of them is a "morel" mushroom house. I created the tall, plainer mushroom in Illustrator and the other

Mushroom Village for Flash animation class project

two in Photoshop, playing around with photographs and simplifying them with the "cutout" filter, one of my favorites. But they did start out with initial drawings, just so I could get my ideas out of my head, you know? I'll see if I can find the original drawings for the mushroom village and post them at a later date, maybe a follow-up mushroom art post?

Drive-by post: Daily Art

     A textured gradient created in Photoshop CS4. I just love color and filters. Might play around with In Design tomorrow or modify some of the fireworks photos I took tonight. Once I open up Photoshop, In Design, Illustrator or Flash, I just want to spend hours playing around. Fun stuff...