I'm sneaking in a plug for my friend and yours, kossack 4Freedom. Please take a few seconds to vote for her Netroots Nation scholarship. The deadline is Tuesday. Here's a link to all the reasons she deserves it (if'n you didn't already know). Good luck 4, I'm rootin' for ya! Give her a hand, yo!
And now, please forgive the utter self-indulgence of the remainder of this post.
Photoshop is the Big Daddy of digital art software programs. It's something of an electronic miracle for photographers and computer artists. Its power is just amazing. I have sometimes fantasized about what it would be like to sit with Leonardo at a maxed out MAC and demonstrate Photoshop for him. I can just imagine the awe and wonder it would inspire in him. I'm in love with the program myself.
I have written before about my interest in digital art here and here.
One of the things I love to do is to find old photos in the public domain and enhance them with color or other digital manipulations ranging from the simple addition of color to more involved and complex manipulation.
Colorizing a black and white photo is more complicated than it might seem, especially when you do more than simply tint the whole thing one color. The more colors introduced, the more complicated, generally, often involving multiple layers of varying opacity sitting atop one another or bleeding into each other by use of layer masks of graduated opacity.
Here are two versions of a recent piece I call New Yawk City (II & III).
Here's another example of an expressive use of a vintage photo, this one by one of my favorite photographers, Edward S. Curtis.
Old Crow (original)
Old Crow (my version)
I'm showing the left half of the painting here, so as to show the detail a little better. The right half is black. The added black lends a haunting quality to the image that doesn't come through quite as strongly here.
One of the interesting things that Photoshop allows me to do is combine multiple photos or paintings into one piece of art by very carefully executed 'cut and paste'. Here's a tribute to Picasso that I made using this technique. I call this one Pablo.
Here I cut out the figure from a Maxfield Parrish painting and projected it against a Hubble Space Telescope image of deep space. I call it Dreaming the Universe Into Being.
Here are a few recent 'paintings':
Workers NYC (based on a vintage photo)
Workers NYC II
Hard Dollar Cafe (based on a vintage photo)
John Brown's Body (based on a vintage photo)
Finally, I also sometimes design web banners, web pages or logos for various clients and friends. A few examples:
The following two web page designs suffer substantially by being reduced to 550 pixels for display in this diary (this is true for all the images in this diary, but is especially true for these because of the detail). The originals are nearly twice that size:
And last but not least:
I am open to any and all criticism and/or questions. Thank you for your kind attention.