Kat Eye Studio

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A Lesson in Simplicity

Hello and happy Thursday! It’s been a busy week for me. Lots of little loose ends to tie up, much of it has seemed to center around prep for exhibitions and framing. Someday, when I get framing all figured out to my liking, I’ll share what I’ve learned. I’ve got creating and printing under my belt now, but framing! Ugh!

For this week’s Paint Party Friday post I wanted to share one of my favorite recent paintings, Reaching Toward the Sun, and the little lesson I learned from it. This one is a lesson in simplicity.

Reaching toward the Sun

Reaching Toward the Sun

It all started on a crisp and sunny Saturday afternoon. Walking back from a relaxing visit to the local coffee shop with my son, I noticed these wonderful dead plants along the path. They were so lacy and delicate, standing tall in the sun even after they had lived their life, I had to play. I spent a while trying to capture their beauty, sending my son on home ahead of me because he was getting bored waiting. It’s nice to have an older kid now. 🙂

Composition was challenging with a fence and convenience store right behind the plants, but isn’t that always the way of photography? Sometimes you have to work for that perfect shot. Of the bunch, I loved the gently curving lines of the stalks and the way the sun highlighted the details in this one:

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OK, so now it’s time to play. I’ll walk you through some of the different options I tried:

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The blue sky in the original was pretty but a little too blue. I wanted to soften up the color but still keep that glowing sun. I played around with several options in Snapseed (top row). When I come across an effect I think I like as I play, I always save the image to the camera roll. I have no idea if I will use it later, but I want to remember as I’m playing what came before. You never know what you might want later!

Next it was time to play with effects. The first two in the second row were from the original photo processed through decim8, a really cool app that creates interesting modern/digital effects, but it was not what I was going for with this piece. I needed soft!

So then it was into the painting apps. All of those shown are from Autopainter HD or Autopainter II. I tried painting with both the original photograph and the edited blue-green photograph. I liked the blue-green ones the best. (There are more painting experiments in my camera roll, I could only fit a few here.)

Now that I had some good options and ideas for direction, I pulled the blue-green image into Image Blender and started to play.

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It quickly became obvious that the seed head at the bottom of the frame, which hadn’t bothered me in the original photo, was just going to be a distraction in the final painting. So I pulled the blue-green image into TouchRetouch and quickly edited out. This is a super simple app that works great for quick corrections like this. Doesn’t that look better?

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Now that I had a new photo, I needed to go back through and recreate the painted layers. Since I had already narrowed down my direction through earlier experimentation, I only recreated a few of the layers that I thought I might want to use, and started blending.

The first blend I did was the blue-green image with this watercolor layer:

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And guess what? That first blend became my final image:

Reaching toward the Sun

Reaching toward the Sun

After playing some more I realized that first blend captured exactly what I wanted, the soft colors, the sun on the stalks, with the gentle, painterly feel. It was a lesson in simplicity. After spending the last few weeks blending many, many layers to finish a piece, I realized sometimes you don’t need that. Something simple will do. Just like every photograph doesn’t need to become a digital painting, every digital painting doesn’t need to be complex. The experimentation was all good though, it helped me refine my artistic vision and really be clear about what I want to communicate in the final piece so I could make choices accordingly.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s lesson in simplicity! It’s also this week’s “mobile tutorial.” I’ve created a page on the blog sidebar under the Resources heading called “Mobile Apps, Tutorials and Resources” and you can find a link to all of these little tutorials there, along with some web resources and (eventually) a list of apps I recommend. I’ve gotten a lot of questions from readers as I’ve explored this new medium and I want to make it easy for you to find the information I’m sharing as I learn. Let me know if you have any questions. Maybe the answers will pop up in one of these posts!

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Comments

  1. I love how this turned out. I am a on again off again person with my phone and taking photos with it. Depends on my mood. I always appreciate when people share what they have learned and what they like.

  2. Another beautiful painterly image. And an excellent lesson. I struggle with this sometimes – trying all my different actions and color effects, thinking every image needs to be obviously “worked on” – when sometimes it is the simple result that is exactly what is needed.

  3. I love this image Kat. Thank you for sharing so much incredible information but especially for sharing your beautiful work.

  4. Nice one, Kat! You are right, the simplicity in this one is what makes it so beautiful. That blue-green sky is marvelous and that beauitful watercolory blend is stunning. Great work! You are amazing. Happy PPF

  7. The blue green sky is just so perfect… it looks like a May sky over here in Autumn… and love that you are showing all the steps… I keep thinking I will use more of my photos but then promptly forget about it but maybe if I visit you enough it will sink in and I will get moving on it!!!!

  8. I do appreciate all that you share…with iPad in hand I see I can play with this too!! Lovely outcome. Thanks!

  9. Again such beauty!
    Thank you Kat for sharing with us your iPhone art and all those resources, what a gift!

  11. I really appreciate hearing about all your steps here. Your end result is just beautiful. It captures all the feelings about freedom, yearning and fragility that dandelions bring out in me. Happy PPF!

    • Oh, “yearning and fragility” is a perfect way to describe it. Thank you for giving me the words!!

  13. This is very beautiful! I have so much to learn about framing. Any wisdom you can share would be much appreciated. I get so intimidated by the whole thing that I procrastinate forever.

  15. this is so very beautiful Kat! I admire your keen sense of layering etc.Thanks ofr sharing the details. Happy PPF!

  17. I love the wispy style the most. Thanks for showing and encouraging us towards reaching out and finding design in various ways. 🙂

  20. I just the the collage of all the different processing!! So cool…Nature in it’s perfection…you captured it!!

    Hugs Giggles

  21. Beautiful! I’m just getting started with mobile photography. This may seem like a dumb question, but how do you get your images from your iPhone/iPod to your iPad? I know–the Cloud. But what do you use to go in between?

    • Actually, I don’t use the Cloud. Apple’s iCloud PhotoStream reduces the resolution of your images when it transfers between devices. You definitely don’t want that! I use an the Photo Transfer app and transfer directly between devices via WiFi or Bluetooth. To get the files onto my computer, I upload from the iPad directly into Lightroom via the standard Import interface.

  23. Absolutely gorgeous – I haven’t had the time (and it does take time) to have any mastery of digital photo manipulation. I do love your results and thanks for sharing your process!

  24. What a beautiful image, love the softness and the colours, and the perspective is just perfect! I love playing with photo apps, and have already (too) many to keep track of them – and now I’ll probably have to download some more!

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