Open Hatch

Posts Tagged ‘Art’

[Update: I've revised this painting. Twice. Except.. I miss some of the more raw impressionist effects of the second revision.. may clear out the excess detail of the third revision..]

I’m in love.

For reference and history, the first version of the painting is here. The second version is here.

How I made this:

1. iPhone4 taking a picture in HDR mode (I think?).
2. Photoshop CS5 transplanting street and construction objects in original photo with turf/leaves/trees/mountain backdrops via “content-aware fill” (which is amazing – have a look here.)
3. Painter 12 “Auto-paint” feature running batches of various brushing paramaters I fed it, to make an overlay to my own hand-painted work: digital watercolor cloning (of the photo), and oil cloning of a broad, messier under-painting (from the photo).
4. Photoshop again, to mix layers: layer 1 is oil under-painting, layer 2 is watercolor layer in color dodge layer blend mode, layer 3 is auto-paint batches at 60 percent transparency.

So this is mixed digital media in three layers: a lower layer of oil, a middle layer of watercolor, and another top layer of oil. But it’s like all the light in the watercolor dodged everything in the oil beneath it (which you cannot do in real life), and on top of all that is more oil, mixed as viscous material but very translucent (maybe you could do that with a thinning agent? I don’t know real oil painting).

[Update: now it's multiple layers of multiple types of media, multi-layers themselves combined in stages using clipping masks in Photoshop; and additionally including digital colored pencil.]

If you’re also in love with it, you may buy a print with a variety of options.

I am downloading so many gigabytes of abstract art animations from where someone has uploaded their repository of Electric Sheep movie files (I’m in contact with this person; I’ll be uploading the ones I have for him – and for you! – to access). As I do this, the download eventually runs into an error: out of hard drive space.

Yoink!

I’ll need to move what I’ve downloaded to an external hard drive to free up space. So I connect the drive and start doing this. The computer hangs (several high octane applications open, music playing, and many high octane data transfers will do this – if your computer is a few years old). No usual attempts to unfreeze it succeed. Finally it occurs to me it’s the data transfer that is probably the real holdup; I’ve seen this setup unfreeze before if I simply disconnect the external drive to interrupt it. I disconnect it, and the instant I do so, everything else on my computer is freed up, including my music player, which proceeds to the next song in my queue, which it happens is not a song, but a video game sound effect, and this sound effect besides:

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How appropriate.

If you have not enjoyed this happenstance, you may take reprieve in the idea that it is possible you may not be a nerd. And/or that you have never played (or fully understood, as it becomes any human beings’ divine duty to understand) EARTHBOUND, the classic among classic Super Nintendo video games from which this sound effect comes, at a moment at which a very important something (someone), a bee, dies. Like.. like.. like a failed data transfer. Oh, the poetry.

You may find this useful as the days get warmer. Click the image for a much larger version. Here is the original Photoshop format file for you to mess with, and here’s a .pdf version for easier printing, too.