Mobile Art Monday No.52

The first edit for 2017...
I've spent a whole week cleaning out my 'studio'. Completely rearranged. Cleaned off shelves. Took stuff off walls. Hauled out three bags of trash. You can even see the 'whole' floor. It's so nice I don't want to mess it up. My still life shooting area is twice as big and I now have a wall to shoot against instead of a window. One big thing remaining is that I'd love to pull out the carpet and put down vinyl wood plank. But I don't need another project right now. My brain is fried. I was just thinking about how many decisions I have made in the past week. Everything I picked up had to go somewhere. I was making decisions every few seconds. No wonder that was so tiring. And the past couple days I've been culling photos from last month. After awhile you just say think "oh heck, keep 'em all." But after reclaiming space in the 'studio' I intend to reclaim space on my computer too. More about that later.
One thing I did while cleaning was take photos of all my dried weeds I've been collecting so I could throw most of them away. (That took a few hours.)
This is the first in my 'weeds series'.

I began layering and in Superimpose. The only downside to this app is you must merge the top layer into the bottom before adding any more. 

The upside of this app is that you can save (upload) your top layer if you've masked away the background and then 'download' it to reuse it again and again. Which is what I did with the hydrangea flowers.

 Next I opened Stackables to add one of my formulas.

 Then in iColorama, under Sketch, I used the image before texturing to get this line drawing.

I opened the two images in Procreate to blend the sketch over the textured image. The blend mode was set to multiply and slightly skewed for effect. I usually don't use procreate for simple 2 layer blending but I wanted to try some hand drawing on it. I wasn't impressed with anything I tried this time.

At this point I opened it in Retouch to eliminate a couple stems that I should have taken care of earlier, resulting in the finished piece.

Hope you're having a great Mobile Art Monday!

Mobile At Monday No. 45

I'm not sure where May went but I didn't get much posted on my blog. I may have to make up for lost time. I know I took a record number of photos last month and have yet to process most of them (including grandkid pics in the poppy gardens).

I've been wanting to create illustrative type works and I think I've finally achieved one way to do this.

The original.

I held a white foam core board as a background out in my garden while capturing this shot.

Well, I say this is the original but if you look toward the lower left corner you can see a few light dots where I attempted some cloning (healing) in Snapseed. It wouldn't cooperate so I quit knowing I would need to take out the other stem and was thinking about moving the lower right bud up into the photo more. At this point I got distracted so later when I started my editing I forgot and just jumped right in to Stackables.

Here's a TIP... When planning on applying textures, don't increase the exposure such that your background is white. A light tan or grey works so much better with adding textures and changing blend modes.

Here are a few edits I came up with as I played.

I loved them all but decided to play with the middle one.

I loaded my original in iColorama to make a black and white sketch. Choose Style> Edges> Preset 9/19 set on overlay to give its touch of color and reduced the edge size to 50%.

Next I loaded the 'yellow' version into Leonardo and the drawing version from iColorama. I set the blend mode to color burn.

I saved this and loaded it into Retouch. I cloned out the stem on the left and the whole bud on the right and saved it. 

I then loaded it into Leonardo so I could 'move' the bud higher. I did this by duplicating my layer, masking out all but the bud, then moving it to line up higher on the stem.

Since there appears to be some 'missing' lines, I open it in Procreate to add more. While I'm there I decide to add some paint and a little texture. 

Another TIP...

I pulled a 'photoshop' move which is lightening or darkening an area by painting white or black with the layer blend mode set to overlay or soft light. Your brush opacity needs to be very low. I really liked the look and will probably use that for future edits. It's especially nice to have optional brushes to use and be able to better control the area effected.

Once more back to Stackables where I add one texture that brightens and makes it pop more.

Hope you're having a great Mobile Art Monday!

Mobile Art Monday No. 43

Five of my regularly visited apps were used in this edit. 

The original...

The first, Retouch to "mess" up the background and get rid of the extra flower.

The second, Snapseed for general tweets and a little vintage filter.

Third, Repix to "paint" the background. (Use the eraser brush to take brush marks off the flower.)

Fourth, in iColorama I did three edits.

Style>Coherence with these settings.

Style>Sketch with these settings.

And Style>Water with these settings.

The into Stackables for texture and brightening.

Hope you've had a great Mobile Art Monday!

Mobile Art Monday No. 42

I had an editing frenzy yesterday while on the road heading home. The scenery was boring and I was tired of shooting from a moving vehicle. Besides, I had taken the mother-in-law for a drive around her town and a bit into the country so I had quite a stash to choose from.

I have a new Stackables formula for you today called Clouds. It's perfect for those cloudless skies. Click here to download the Cloud formula and save it to your Dropbox. 

Now on your device, open Dropbox and click the file. In the upper right corner, click the first box (with arrow pointing up) Use the 'Open in' option and choose Stackables. It will ask if you want to import the formula, tap 'Import'.

This was my (nearly) original after cropping and lightening shadows and such in Snapseed. I removed the power lines in Retouch. (Tip: remove part of them at a time, it turns out better.)

I then decided to see what Clarity in Camera+ would do. Then added two filters on top of that.

Since I was working on my phone I didn't have access to my hundreds of custom presets from my iPad. (I should remedy this and transfer a few favorites.) So I had a play with some of the featured artists formulas. (The center beaker with the star.) These were a couple of favorites.

Sands of Time

Crystalline 

This is another shot edited with the Clouds formula.

Sands of Time 

Another cool one from that group, Winter Sunset.

An abandoned house edited with Camera+ similar to the first one.

More featured artists' formulas. By Gone.

Jai Ho

I can hardly believe that someone lives there but they apparently think satellite is a necessity.

With all the flowers starting to bloom I may post more this week. That also means more work in the garden however, and soar muscles. I see a massage in my future.

Have a great Mobile Monday!

Mobile Art Monday No. 41

Start to Finish Crocus

Once in awhile I have to do a sharp clean edit but that doesn't have to mean just clean it up.

I call this Crocus at Midnight.

It is anything but as you can see from the original.

First step was in Snapseed where it was cropped and a few tweaks added in the Tune Image section.

Then in the Selective edit section you can see the areas that I lowered the brightness and one that the brightness was increased. 

Then a dark vignette was added. Lastly, in the Vintage section I chose the first preset and saved my image.
 If you want a great through tutorial on Snapseed, check out the folks at Mobiography at this link. The only thing they don't cover is copying settings to another image. You can find that here.

I wanted to clone out a few spots and tone down a few so I used Retouch for that.

iColorama has a nice setting for flowers that I use sometimes. Style> Coherence>1. Then changed the blend mode to screen.

Have you ever tried 'coherence'? It can be pretty cool, even on people.

Have a great Monday!