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Sunday 25 May 2014

Langkawi - Monkey

I was looking through all my hubby's photographs to find some special ones to convert to put onto the wall of our new apartment and I came across this photograph which I thought was rather amusing.  
While we were staying in a villa on the Malaysian island of Langkawi, the monkeys used to try to raid the villa chiefly to get the M&Ms out of the fridge! I took this picture of a monkey desperate to come into the villa but as you can see the picture wasn't very good at all so the challenge was to see if there was anything I could do with it. The problem with a blurred picture is that if you apply any filters, the chances are it will not work well at all so I set about trying to sharpen it somehow. I improved the lighting using levels, bumped up the saturation and then emphasised different parts of the body by using the dodge and burn too. I also removed the window light strip and applied the filter, accented edges.

I then set about trying to do something arty with it and I have to say I really struggled.  I look the picture into Studio Artist to get some interesting transformations which I have to say didn't work well.  However, I bought them back into PSE and blended them together with a texture.

This was the best I could do.  I don't think it will get a place on the wall but it was a great challenge.


Sunday 18 May 2014

Breakfast Art

How do you make a full English breakfast plate look interesting? With difficulty I realised. If you make it look close to realistic it just looks yuck. So the only thing to do is to completely abstract it.  This was my best effort I think:
In fact once I had made it really abstract, I defined my abstractions as patterns and these were great. So here are my breakfast patterns!




Sunday 11 May 2014

Breakfast in Hong Kong

Saturdays, Sundays and Public Holidays are the days to go to the Main Escalator in Midlevels in Hong Kong and find yourself a good restaurant to have brunch.  Lots of the restaurants open around 10am and serve a good breakfast menu.

Went there over a public holiday and came across a chap sitting in the restaurant's pavement area with his three dogs. They were real chick magnets and I couldn't resist taking a picture of the two main bulldogs who were lying beside each other.  I made some changes in PSE and then took them into Studio Artist for some further manipulation:


Friday 9 May 2014

Online Courses at Artful Gathering

Thought it was about time that I looked at doing some online courses.  I was looking at some of the courses at Artful Gathering and liked the look of Diana Mulder's class so I had a look on her website.  I found an interesting blog post she did a while back where she used the online software picnik which unfortunately is no longer available.  I love what she did with her botanicals but she said that she felt that she should go further and did anyone have any ideas.  Well, that's like putting a red flag to a bull so I copied the leaves (see post) that she posted and did a bit of messing around with it in Photoshop Elements.  So Diana, here are the results.

The manipulations became so complex in the end that I'm sorry I can't show you how I did it. For example, in the manipulation below I have shown all the different layers.  They all have different blend modes.