Kat Eye Studio

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And then the rain came…

Ah, yes. Rain. I live in Oregon, and yet I forget about the rain sometimes. We’ve had a good run of not-so-rainy weather and you know how I know? I had forgotten about puddle paintings! Until yesterday, when I was walking into work and the reflection of trees in puddles on the parking lot surface caught my eye. Really, it’s not like it’s been that long since it was rainy. I think I just have a short attention span!

Last night when I looked at the photos I was inspired to create this piece:

And then the rain came...

And then the rain came…

I’ll show you how it came together for this week’s Paint Party Friday post.

It starts with the captured image of a tree reflection in a parking lot puddle. I now use ProCamera for capturing most of my iPhone images. I like that I can switch between 1:1 and other aspect ratios in app and can easily separate the focus and exposure when needed. The “Anti-Shake” shutter is also really nice for avoiding blurry pics when the light is low… like if we have an overcast day or I’m in a shady forest or something. (Um, yeah, that’s pretty much all the time for me anymore.)

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Then I pulled the photo into Snapseed to rotate and add some color and texture. I felt a bit blue yesterday.

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From there, it was into texturing apps to play with textures and see what happened. I liked this one, from Distressed FX. Hey, my blue turned to green! But I really liked the effect.

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I could have stopped there, but it was not quite as abstract and painterly as I wanted. So into the painting apps… Glaze, the Autopainter apps (HD, 2 and 3) to see what I could do with it. It’s interesting how some painting apps really work well for one type of image, and then don’t work at all for another. That’s the part about this whole digital painting thing that is full of play and experimentation. There is no precise process in this medium… it just doesn’t work that way.

Out of all of that play, I started with the output from Glaze as the base in Image Blender. I like to start with Glaze output as the base when I can, because the base sets the resolution for the final image. Since I save out of Glaze at the highest resolution (4096×4096), my final blended image is saved at the same resolution, which is larger than the native resolution of the iPhone 5 camera. This means I can print the final image as large as I might want.

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From there, it was just blending of the different images I had created while playing in the different apps. I really can’t remember what I was blending with what, or the blending modes I was using. That’s all play too! But I’ll show you the intermediate blends so you can see how it progressed to the final piece.

Blend 1:

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Blend 2:

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Blend 3:

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Final Image:

And then the rain came...

And then the rain came…

I love the abstraction of the final painting, the watery feel and the depth of color. Even though I started out in a blue mood, the green in this makes my heart sing.

I definitely don’t mind rainy days this winter. People have been wishing for spring, but I’m not asking for it to come yet. I am inspired by the reflections found in puddles, and the blank canvas provided by a grey sky. I’m getting out to hike regardless of the weather, or maybe because of the weather, as the rain and mist provides such atmosphere to the forest. I am grateful, every day, for this wonderful art form that inspires me so much.

Here’s a happy song that resonates with me right now. Enjoy!

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Night into Day

I’m taking a little break from the Lights of Night to share some of my favorite digital paintings from the last week for Paint Party Friday. I continued my exploration with the new process, moving from monochromatic paintings to multiple colors. I love the feeling in this first one, which I call Winter Fire. It does have kind of a fire-and-ice feel to it, doesn’t it? I like how the trees are just barely visible, but you see enough of them to make them out. What do you see in this painting? What is your interpretation of the scene?

Another favorite this week is a study of lines. Nature’s lines. The lines you find in nature often seem chaotic, but there is a pattern to them. I love seeing the pattern in things, whether it’s in nature or in an engineering problem. Just call me goofy!

Finally, in the spirit of the Lights of Night theme that I have going on this week, I thought I would share a digital creation that is not a “painting” but has the feel of night. This one was taken during the middle of the day, but I love that I can give an impression of night through my processing. I call this work “Night into Day.” Hmmm… maybe I should try making a painting out of this one, and see what happens!

If you want to see more of what I’ve been creating you can follow me on Instagram or Flickr. I’ve been posting new work there daily.

Happy Holidays to the Paint Party Friday crowd!

PS – Don’t miss the giveaway of a spot in my upcoming Find Your Eye: Journey of Fascination series over on the Moms Who Click blog. You can still enter!

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It Comes Together

Isn’t it fun when something new comes together in your art? It’s like all of the preparation and experimentation and play lead you to this place where everything just clicks. There is a moment of “a-ha!” and you discover that you have a new process. That happened for me this week!

I think I discovered it on Saturday, when I created this digital painting:

I loved it. Absolutely loved it. And so I tried something similar with the next one:

And, oh my goodness, if I didn’t love that one too! And then I realized that I had discovered a new process. A certain type of photo, a certain sequence of editing, and I could get these gorgeous tree paintings. I’ve been experimenting all week and starting to learn what does and doesn’t work for the aesthetic I want. I’m playing within this process with variations.

I just can’t get enough! I find that after my dark, moody binge a couple of weeks ago I just want this color. And texture. And light. It feels like freedom.

Happy Paint Party Friday!!

I normally don’t post twice in one day but things got away from me with getting new eCourses ready for registration this week! Here’s what’s going on…

  • Fuel Your Creativity, a one-week eCourse to kick off the new year with a creative burst, is open for registration. This is not a photography course. Everyone is invited!
  • An all-new eCourse in the Find Your Eye series, Journey of Fascination, is open for registration too. This series will run January/February.
  • December’s Exploring with a Camera will post tomorrow! Visit Friday and see what we’ll be studying this month.

Whew. I think that’s all for now…

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Winter Flowers

There has been an interesting development for me lately. After months of not participating in Paint Party Friday, suddenly it’s getting difficult to decide just what to share! Now that I am considering my digital artwork to be “paintings” I find that I am creating too many to share just one day a week. Before, with traditional painting, I was doing good to pick up the brush most weeks. I think I have finally found my painting medium.

I have discovered another thing, the ones I want to share for Paint Party Friday have become the ones where I’d like to share how I created the final piece. It must be the teacher in me, but I get questions on how I did something and I can’t help but want to share with you so you can try it too. So here I go… with this week’s painting: Winter Flowers.

Winter Flowers

The painting starts off, as always for me, with a photograph. This was captured with my iPhone5 using the Slow Shutter Cam app, which allows you to mimic a long shutter speed. You can get some cool blur effects this way. Be forewarned though: You will have to experiment and take a lot of images to get one or two usable ones, but it’s worth it!

This image has some of the softness I was going for, but I wanted to enhance it further. I pulled it into the Glaze app and tried different glazes. This was my favorite:

Do you see the subtle color shifts that happened, along with the painterly edges? It seemed to deepen the shadows and make for a more dimensional image. Very cool. I didn’t like the regular looking brushstrokes that happened along the petals though. Time to pull it into the Iris Photo Studio app, and blend it back with the original photo:

This adds a little bit more structure back into the lines and brightens things up, but it didn’t get rid of the regular looking brustrokes, so there was one more step. I opened the image in Pixlr Express PLUS and applied a texture. The great thing about this app, as opposed to the similar and simpler Pixlr-o-Matic from the same company, is that you can adjust the amount of the effect that is applied. So I toned down the texture a little bit to make it more subtle. Here’s the final image again:

Winter Flowers

I am really happy with how this one turned out! I am going to print it to see how it looks on paper. I hope you are enjoying these and starting to get some ideas for creating digital art this way. The possibilities are endless, and tons of fun!

Oh, and if you don’t have a smartphone to join in with all of this app fun, I’ve run into a couple of options online to play with editing your photos this way. Check out pixlr.com and psykopaint.com. Have fun!

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Rain Painting

I seem to be in a monochromatic mood with my recent work! I’m creating with very simple color schemes including a lot of black. Maybe it’s the change of the season… after so much bright color with the leaves I am enjoying the toned down color of winter.

This week for Paint Party Friday I thought I would share this recent piece of digital art, Rain Painting, along with how I created it:

Rain Painting

I shared a square version of this work over the weekend through Instagram, but I really like the rectangular version so much better! It seems to emphasize the tall trees and painterly feel.

OK, so how did I create it… First, I started with this image, taken out a rainy window from the backseat of our car last Friday:

Photographing from a car is always a challenge, because you have to act quickly to frame and capture whatever is there. I think using a camera phone helps because I could get it set up and then anticipate the photograph by watching the trees that were coming up ahead. I liked this right out of the camera, but wanted to add more texture and warmth to it, so I first took the image through the Pixlr Express PLUS app to shift the color and add a texture:

I also wanted to add a more painterly feel, so I took the original photo through the Glaze app to create this version:

Finally, I took all three images, original, textured and glazed, and combined them using the Iris Photo Suite app. I don’t remember the blending modes or percentages I used, though! Blending images is typically a one-time thing, just playing around with modes and percentages until the combination looks right. And here’s the final version again:

Rain Painting

I like how it turned out. It brings me a moody, wet feeling – kind of like a rainy day. Winter has definitely arrived in Oregon!

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