Fine Art
Composite
Imagery
Passion Project:
Photoshop Artistry
Overview:
As a visual artist with a great passion for photography combined with Photoshop artistry, I challenged myself to embark on a creative journey meant to be a learning, innovative, and experimental approach to creating art. Fine Art Composite Imagery is a compilation of digital artworks that came to be as a result of letting my own imagination roam free in order to allow it to reveal its own version of an otherwise ordinary image.
Deliverables:
Produce Fine Art digital artworks that unite original identities with a spin of innovative perspective, resulting in unique creative compositions that open up a glimpse into the wild and free world of the imagination.
Project Goal:
Accept the challenge to try new things, learn new techniques, and take a public domain image through a creative metamorphosis using the application of various compositing and photo-manipulation techniques. See what’s possible and let the new creation introduce itself as it slowly emerges from the hidden depths of the creative mind. But most importantly, enjoy the process and find delight in a finished piece.
Below you will find some of the artworks I have created but also a brief commentary describing some technical aspects, along with the thought process behind each piece.
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Photo by Avonne Stalling from Pexels
| The Gatekeeper
“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”
– Henry Van Dyke
If you could step into a time travel portal, what do you think you’d be carrying with you? Fear? Curiosity? Hope at the chance to fix something broken? Or perhaps, joy rooted out from the glimpse of excitement to see someone lost to you somehow?
These and many other questions have engaged many philosophers and scientists in conversation. And, while the laws of physics allow for time travel, no one has actually done it. Or have they?
Some claim that one can embark in a journey through time by simply looking at a photograph. There is some truth in that… And while as an artist I can imagine what that might look like, I could also attempt to dip into the fabric of time by capturing my own creative process. I find it quite thrilling to look back and see an artwork unfold itself element by element, hence the following snippets I took along the way.
One way or another, this piece assumed its own theme, as it arrived to the final look and feel. Some events in my personal life also helped, but as I was taking screenshots (as I always do), I saw a flicker of an idea: a gatekeeper to a portal - a vortex that distorts the present into past or future. And depending on how you see things, it might also be a passage into a brighter and more colorful world on so many levels. Accordingly, the magic around the portal serves the purpose to visually represent the paradoxical nature of time travel as a concept. The gatekeeper is of course a magical creature, or maybe she is a representation of each of us and the way we choose to walk through life. Winston Churchill once said a brilliant thing: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
And so, if one was truly at the reins of the vessel that we call life, is there really such a thing as choice, or is it all predetermined, and time is nothing else but an illusion that keeps repeating itself over and over in a never-ending loop?
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Human Form Study |
Human Form Study is a personal on-going challenge to explore various photo manipulation techniques, aiming to fuse the human form with a variety of textures and painterly effects. Converting the original photograph from color to B&W is only one of the initial prep stages. Textures are gradually introduced and carefully dialed in at just the right opacity until an interesting balance is achieved between all the elements.
Photo by 3Motional Studio from Pexels
I find it especially fun to blend a subject with heavy rough brush strokes, so that it almost appears as if the model emerges in fragments from a dark background. But it is never my intention to keep the composition simply black and white despite the tempting visual contrast. Hence, the re-introduction of color - partial, yet strategic.
Ultimately the color's role is to reach a "crescendo" and, thus, bring the entire composition to life through gradients and vibrance. The headpiece constructed from fractals and extractions is carefully blended with the rest of the composition. However, it gains a completely different look once splashes of different colors are added, maintaining the balance between highlights and shadows.
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Photo by Taryn Elliott from Pexels
| In Love With The Stars
The fascination with the universe and the celestial bodies that it houses has always been a part of human inquisitiveness. The same way we gaze upon our moon wondering what’s out there, imagine if we lived on a planet where a night sky would open up in a spectacular celestial view. The artwork below explores this idea by transitioning from its original state to an otherworldly landscape of awe and wonder.
Now take a moment to imagine sitting on a cliff and looking at the open night sky. If you could see this planet or moon in real life at this exact scale staring back at you, would it frighten you, or perhaps, make you feel so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe? Or, would it make you feel so darn lucky for being ably to see it and appreciate its grandeur? I feel fortunate to be able to at least imagine it.
"Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams, Twilight Hours:
A Legacy Of Verse
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The Nest |
I tend to be especially attracted to imagery that has some sense of motion captured within. It makes my mind immediately imagine possibilities and settings that would express that motion furthermore. And so to make the original image more captivating, I expanded the idea of movement to the sky through the transient clouds that seem to move outwards from the subject. The addition of the headpiece composed from scratch builds upon that movement uniting blurry fire-like lines with sharp stationary edges of the tree branches. Yet, nothing screams more movement, and perhaps some sort of agitation, like the upward flying birds. The fragmentation of the subject’s dress was the most challenging part of the composition. I didn’t really know what it was meant to look like, so I kept experimenting, blending in additional photos and light. The result was a structure resembling of a nest, embedded inside a human-like creature.
Photo by Analise Benevides on Unsplash
What does it mean? Does it tell a story? It does to me. However, it’s more of a feeling that it conveys than a specific message. Something about the sense of fleeting time - a reminder that nothing is permanent. That feeling when all that’s left are memories. And yet, as ephemeral as they might feel, nothing is ever lost.
Susan Fletcher expressed an interesting thought in her novel:
“But they fly. It is what fledged birds must do, and she’s always known that. The nest can’t always be full.”
- The Silver Dark Sea
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Photo by Minh Pham on Unsplash
| The Mermaid
In my attempt to digitally turn an image into a drawing, I pushed myself further by selectively combining a splash of color with black and white toning, while bringing the composition together via a fun interplay of paint textures. My initial task to transform the original photograph into a pencil drawing or a sketch, quickly escalated into a creative challenge to combine a black & white composition with bright colors. As the examples below illustrate, the B&W subject appears to be swimming in a gray environment gradually infused with splashes of colorful paint.
The main goal for this piece was to achieve a non-digital look that rather resembles a mixture of drawing and painting. Seemingly a product of mixed media, the artwork was crafted solely of a combination of carefully selected photographic fragments.
Yet, what truly brought the composition to life is the texture applied in multiple layers.
Not only does it add a sense of depth and a cohesive unity to the overall composition, it also creates that illusion of brush strokes on a canvas-like fabric.
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Catalina |
Do you ever imagine what your favorite fiction character would look like in real life? I do sometimes, so I challenged myself to create a representation of a character derived from a literary work. I chose the poem “Luceafărul” written in 1883 by the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu.
The snippets below demonstrate the gradual transformation of the subject from an ordinary girl into a princess. The main accessory to support the royal look is obviously the crown, constructed piece by piece through lots of trial and error combining vector with raster assets. In addition, I have changed the color of the subject’s eyes, and slightly corrected the skin toning through basic retouching with techniques such as Dodge & Burn and painting with light.
Photo by Irina Gromovataya from Pixabay
In the end, the goal was to create an atmosphere of magic around the subject. Hence, I chose to merge the foreground with the background while maintaining an illusion of depth of field.
And in case you’re wondering who Cătălina is, she is the female lead character - a princess and her parents’ only child. Her beauty is described in the first few verses of the poem that set the stage for an impossible love story between a human and a celestial being, whose name is Luceafărul (aka Lucifer or The Morningstar).
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A Girl Lives Here |
This piece is the result of an exercise. The task was to try to turn a photograph into a drawing (shown below). In that regard, I’ve used a combination of techniques and blending modes I’ve never dared to combine before. I was pleasantly surprised to discover how an image set to Color Dodge, then Inverted, then taken through a Gaussian blur filter turned right before my eyes from a photograph into a drawing! Further adjustments were necessary, of course, to achieve a cleaner and more defined result. But I couldn’t simply stop here. I wanted to take it a lot further, or dare I say, I wondered where it will take me…
Photo by Averie Woodard on Unsplash
Have you ever looked at a door wondering who might be living there? Some doors are aesthetically more interesting than others, but of one truth I am certain - they are all entryways to stories of dwellings and those who reside in them. That’s the idea that popped into my head when I began experimenting with that “drawing,” setting it against walls as street art, and eventually doors (so many of them, until I settled on the perfect one). I wanted to emphasize the story-telling connotation by projecting extra lighting over the subject, playing with the highlights, shadows, and even a gradation of color. All these seemingly unworthy to mention details, not just contribute to the overall composition, they bring to life the entire piece by drawing the eye to the subject that stares back at the viewer with so much mystery and wonder…
Does a girl really live here? Or perhaps, this is a metaphorical representation of an entryway into a girl’s inner world? Who knows? Chances are it might be telling you a completely different story.
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Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash
| Sailing Dream
For me, “Sailing Dream” is an artwork that took me on a journey through my own imaginary world. I read somewhere that dreams are reflections of one’s feelings and emotions, fragments from everyday life circumstances, and even fear projections. And even though dreams are most of the time quite strange, weird, and even frightening, every now and then a dream can be so vividly magical and blissfuly beautiful, making the reality, well, just dull. I was fortunate on at least a couple of occasions to see the Milky Way in a dream as vividly and breathtakingly as the celestial tapestry in the “Sailing Dream.” The only way to commit that vision to memory was via an attempt to reproduce it through art.
The sailing boat represents the metaphor for navigating one’s dream bravely and openly. I remember being scared, yet in complete awe of the sheer magnitude of the open sky. As I watched the stars brightly shine through cloud-like color variations, I felt so small and humble just as the sailing boat in the piece is a modest miniature against the vastness of the starry sky. The zodiac signs that appear to come to light through the darkness, are nothing else but coordinates that guide the vessel to safety. And no, I did not see any zodiac signs in my dream, but strangely enough, I felt safe and at peace despite the overwhelming feeling I felt at the sight of that magnificent sky.
Where do you go when you embark the uncertain waters of slumber? Do your dreams paint otherworldly sceneries in vivid colors? Do you feel safe sailing through your own imagination?