One Four Challenge: Christmas Special

One Four Challenge: Christmas Special – December Week 4

The fourth week of this great challenge from Robyn Gosby at Captivate Me will be my last post of 2014. I want to thank you all for your fantastic support and inspiration this year! I hope everyone has a wonderful Festive Season and New Year.

2015 is going to be a wonderful year for me with my wedding to Simon in Kos, Greece, in May and exciting new ventures with my photography. I may have to scale back on all the blogging Challenges and Themes to focus on other projects but I hope to continue with One Four throughout the year. It’s been great fun!

For this week’s image I made use of Photoshop CC’s Motion Blur, Warp Transform, Liquidise and Invert (among other filters) to make a free-flowing, painted look to my edit. I really wanted to fill the frame with colour and movement! This edit is now vastly different from the original photograph, which I will now reveal in my gallery! I really hope that my edits this month can inspire others to experiment with digital art, to paint with light using both the camera and post processing.

Do you have a favourite? Let me know in the poll and comments!

One Four Challenge: December Week 3

One Four Challenge: December Week 3

I’ve taken some inspiration this week from the Weekly Photo Challenge: Twinkle. I also wanted to make more of a feature of the original subject. I’ve created so many adjustment layers and new background layers for further adjustment that it’s a bit too hard to explain my process step by step! Much of what I do when I’m creating an abstract is unconscious experimentation. To me it feels a lot like the process of painting with oils, creating layers of tone and colour that can be moved around and remoulded to continuously reshape a picture as it grows in your mind’s eye. This one felt like it was growing into a fun starburst! So I do apologise for not going through all my steps this week and just focusing on the resulting image. Hope you all find as much fun in it as I have! Thank you to Robyn Gosby at Captivate Me for hosting this fascinating challenge.

Here are the three edits so far for December:

One Four Challenge: December Week 2

One Four Challenge: December Week 2

I love using abstract digital art to lead a viewer deep inside an image! The first edit of my December image became very vortex-like and reminded a few of us of Doctor Who. I thought I’d stick to a SciFi theme this week that is somewhat inspired by a surreal and brilliant scene within the film Interstellar. How would we see the passage of space and matter when moving at near-lightspeed? How would beings who perceive space in a different dimension to us, whether two or five dimensional, view our world? The mind boggles but it certainly makes for some fun artistic interpretations!

There are eight layers in my image this week which has once again been created using Photoshop. Initially I softened my subject with a Gaussian Blur, then applied a Faded Extrude filter to keep a boost of colour. I then applied a Motion Blur and created three copied layers which were flipped horizontally and vertically and merged with Screen Blending. As ever, many thanks to the lovely Robyn Gosby at Captivate Me for this inspiring challenge 🙂

I’m still keeping the original secret, but here are the two edits so far for this month:

One Four Challenge: December Week 1

One Four Challenge: December Week 1

A new month, a new image and a whole new look! I’m going abstract for December’s challenge from Robyn Gosby at Captivate Me. As it’s the start of the silly season (Christmas!), I’ve chosen coloured lights as my subject. I’m going to be terribly mean to you all though and not reveal my original image until the very end of the month!

I’m working in Photoshop CC this month to create my abstracts. I’m using lots of layers but they’re all derived from the one image. I won’t add any extras in this month. Maybe for a future One Four?

The six layers in this image were treated with a combination of blurs and blended using four different modes. I adjusted contrast, saturation and levels. I finished by merging my layers and adding two canvas sizes, blue and black, to frame the abstract.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Humanity – Imagination

Weekly Photo Challenge: Humanity – Imagination

Humanity is a very BIG word to describe through photography or any other means I think! In terms of relating to the human race and the quality of being human, I think that there is one defining aspect of humanity – our ability to imagine. Throughout the history of our race, imagination has driven our capacity to learn and evolve as no other species. Only a very few animals show signs of this ability and they are among the most intelligent species on Earth next to our own. Many of the greatest minds in history have linked imagination and creativity to humanity. Here a few of my favourite quotes:

I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
Keith Haring

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
Albert Einstein

Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.
Ken Robinson

The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.
Aesop

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
Blaise Pascal

Man lives by imagination.
Havelock Ellis

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.
Lawrence Durrell

Below is a slideshow showing the basic steps I used to create an imaginative flower study. I like to learn through experimentation. The dahlia I had photographed made me think of a glowing ball of flames. I used Lightroom, Photoshop and my imagination to bring my interpretation to life.

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Weekly Photo and Travel Theme Challenges: Textured And Endearing

Weekly Photo and Travel Theme Challenges: Textured And Endearing

I’m actually a bit late with my post this week! It’s been a busy one. I very nearly used this image for last week’s Travel Theme: Simplify, as the photo was taken in a busy park with numerous distractions in the background that I’d needed to eliminate. I decided to do this using several textured masking layers in Photoshop, to draw the viewers focus back to the endearing portrait of the girl with her young puppy.

You can create your own textures to use in this way simply by photographing interesting textured scenes or objects. Rocks, fabrics, bricks and handmade paper are all great for this! There are a number of websites offering free texture downloads for personal and commercial use and right here on WordPress you can visit Public Domain Textures for a wide selection to choose from. Thank you to Leanne Cole for introducing me to the blog, for which she is a regular contributor!

Monochrome Madness: Tips On Processing

Monochrome Madness: Tips On Processing

Monochrome Madness has reached its 22nd week and is still full of surprises and diversity! Thank you to Leanne Cole and Laura Macky for bringing us all together.

I wanted to talk about the processing that went into creating my image for this weeks challenge. I spotted this beautiful horse, a show jumper called Clint, at the Elm Lane Stables where young Mylie was competing in her first show.

He was braying for my attention and I couldn’t resist! Such beautiful lines and markings, he reminded me so much of some of the horses that I used to love painting and sketching.

His pasture was elevated from my position which enabled me to get a great base image of his profile against the sky from which I could work on to get the look I wanted.

 

I imported my original image into Lightroom to get all my levels, hues, saturation and contrast right. I also cleaned up the foreground, removing the strands of grass and thistle with the cloning tool.

I really like this edit, it’s soft and natural. However, I really wanted to get the look of a pencil or charcoal drawing. I tried a monochrome edit in the Nik Software plugin but I wasn’t happy with the results this time. I just couldn’t quite get the detail right!

At this stage I imported my first Lightroom edit into Photoshop CC to make use of some of my customisable Action Pre-sets and brush tools. I was able to isolate my subject using the wand and selection tools to get a crisp white background. I managed to achieve a really punchy, vibrant edit, reminiscent of a pastel drawing, which I accentuated using the smudge and blur tools.

I then used the Greater Than Gatsby Timeless Black and White Action, with a few custom tweaks for my Monochrome Madness image. Really happy with it and I hope you like it too! Here’s a gallery to show the evolution from start to finish.

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Selfie

Weekly Photo Challenge: Selfie

This week’s challenge theme prompted me to revisit a piece I started working on a couple of years ago. I had put it aside about a year ago as I felt I was starting to overwork it.

When I opened it up again in Photoshop I could clearly see that I’d overcomplicated the composition with far too many unnecessary elements. Sometimes less is more! I wanted to leave an air of mystery to the piece.

I really enjoy creating portrait montages with a surreal/fantasy undertone. I have a series of self portraits that I call Dreamscapes and this is number five in the series “Moonstruck”.

Remember Them

For Remembrance Sunday I’ve created a photomontage tribute using photos taken today at the Woking War Memorial.

“They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun
And in the morning
We will remember them.”

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I won’t lie to you, today I have been exhausted!

I am very lucky to have a wonderful man in my life who looks after me and does lovely, little things just to make me smile when I’ve had a rough day 🙂

His Chicken Pie tonight was almost waving hello to me, inviting me to dive in and eat my fill.

I did, it was yummy 🙂