A new artistic endeavor, who knew?

 I got all new computer equipment now. I had to replace the ipad as the battery finally was giving out and now have a new 10.2 ipad so I can play games and do stuff on it because I also bought an apple pencil to go with it. Yay! This is wonderful to use! I had to also buy a 'paper feel' screen protector because the glass is so smooth it slides around when I don't want it to making for some frustration when playing a game or doing other stuff.

I downloaded a program called Sketchbook for using with some of my Second Life things I do. Well it turns out it isn't as good with that as I thought but it works great for doing actual art. I suck at original art, can't draw a straight line with a pencil and ruler, but.. I can sure as heck alter existing photos to make them art apparently.

I know that most art is a matter of practice and repetition, I don't have the patience for that anymore. Previously I used Photoshop Editor to apply different filters and effects on pictures of flowers that I have. All photos are ones that I've taken so it's not like taking someone elses work and messing with it. So I've done those and they are trippy and cool looking and there's even a filter to make it look like a sketch or a comic book so that's also cool. But the supposed 'painting' filter doesn't work as well.

Well now enter Sketchbook which is designed to actually do digital art with all manner of brushes and pens and erasers and all that. I have some eye for artistic things as I have discovered. I'm still figuring out the best settings on brushes and things but so far I've done four or five 'paintings' from photos. At first I was trying to use a photo as a template, use a pencil to sketch the outlines then paint in that way. It will work but I need a bit more practice and the right subject matter to do that. Instead, I discovered actually painting the image using a smudge setting on brushes.

I like it!

'Stream Crossing'

 

Now the only issue is these are photos taken with my phone so the images are rather odd sized. These are done using a brush in the program and just smudging it up to look like painting strokes. I'm just pushing pixels around until it looks good. Some of them have turned out looking very impressionistic and sometimes dream like which is not what I was expecting.

'Summer Meadow'

It's an interesting process and I'm thankful I do have a good eye for composition in my photos for the most part to be able to convert them to a painting. Summer Meadow is one of my favorites on how well it turned out. The trees on the hill took forever to do. I'm learning about different brush effects, flow and strength settings and I go over every inch magnified so there's not a single pixel that is remaining of the original photo.

Is this considered painting or art? I would say yes even more so than someone who has just taken paint and splattered it on a canvas in two or three spots. I'm converting a real image into an artistic impression which is what painters do. There was one that I did where the trees overhead were almost nauseating as I tried to get the right effect to represent the oak canopy. Still not sure I like that one and won't put it up here.

Now the next brainstorm is, will they sell? Do I do them as actual prints or do them as NFT (I had to look that one up) . NFT is a Non-Fungible Transfer, meaning it's a strictly digital image that can be purchased. There are dozens of artists that are doing that but somehow I feel a physical image works better with these. So then I looked into how much printing costs to do it professionally on paper with the right ink and what size it needs to be. The issue is making it big enough to mount but not too big that the pixels are evident. Will be doing some test printing on my home printer to see how it turns out before I spend actual money. 

 

I looked at sites like Zazzle where they will take your art and print it, and taking the Stream Crossing image and going by the physical size of it, it would cost about $33 to put it on good paper, canvas would be much more and that does not even include mat or frame. Which means I would technically need to double that plus half or more in order to sell it so rounding it up makes it $100. I looked at other digital art for sale and boy howdy do people have an exaggerated sense of worth for something that takes little effort to create! I spent two days on the Summer Meadow which doesn't seem like a lot but it was a lot of hours over the course of two days to get it done. 

So what is art? It's all in the eye of the artist dependent on the concept and eye of the viewer. The first image I did was actually done as a painting over the existing image like a transparency and I made it look like an actual painting around the edges. There is a large border around it which I don't remember doing but it works out.

'Painted Gerber Daisy'

 

The caption is under the image, that gives you an idea of how big the border is top and bottom. Trying to figure out how to outline the borders. I'm rather proud of that one as well. Very impressionistic and looks like a painting. Yay!

So there are some photos I've done that are just too busy for me to work on. Lots of leaves or branches or just a complicated image. I will likely leave those as photos but most of my 'Trail' series are wonderful and will be converting those. 

But those three images here, all done with the same program, messing with brush settings and yet, three different 'techniques' and results. I am truly amazed that I did these and hope I can find people that want to have them too.