Mobile Art Monday 8-13-18

This is a lengthy edit, as it took me several days to work through the process. Hope you'll be inspired to create something beautiful.

The original photo, shot in the Cortex Cam app.

1st edit, done in Repix to paint up the background. I used the chalk brush. (Tip: your brush gets smaller when you zoom in and larger when you zoom out.) (Tip 2: use the undo brush to ‘erase paint’ from petals that may have gotten hit.)
2nd edit, using TouchRetouch to clone out stems in upper left.

3rd edit, Brushstroke using S3 preset.

4th edit, with the original photo in iColorama, I chose Style/Edges no. 7 and lowered the size.

5th edit,  a layer stack in Leonardo consisting of first layer original, second layer was the Brushstroke layer opacity reduced to 78%. Third layer, line drawing from iColorama multiply opacity at 75%.

6th edit, Stackables cropped to square and a custom formula added.

7th edit, Procreate app to enlarge and add hand drawn lines and 2 more masked layers of the iColorama line drawing which also lightened it a bit.

8th edit,  back to Repix to paint the background again with Chalk and some of the petals with Van Gogh and the flower center with Drips.

9th edit, Back into Stackables for a border.

10th edit, I used Superimpose to create colored overlays using my image and black and white overlays.

11th edit, opened this in Leonardo and began adding layers of texts and patterns, masking areas of each layer and duplicating as needed.

12th edit, opened this in Formulas and applied Ethereal at 86%.

13th edit, into Snapseed for a bit of Structure and an 8x10 crop for printing.

This list doesn’t include the rabbit trail edits that didn’t make the cut!
After printing this today I've decided to go back and add a curves layer to increase the light areas.

Have a great Mobile Art Monday!

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 Art Monday No. 30

Today I'm warning you to be aware when you combine any old files with new ones...

My finished edit.

This weekend I was cleaning out my iPad and came across a 30% grayish file from April of this year. An accident I assume, but thought I would put it to good use. I would import it into Mextures and make a few textures from some of my saved formulas. I made three, saved them, and decided to play around with the pink one. 

On the left is the texture made in Mextures. On the right, I've used Repix to add more texture and a painterly quality.

Now for some layering. 

In Superimpose, I brought in the Repix edit as the bottom layer and my wilted desert willow as the top layer.

I proceeded to blend and mask, then saved it to camera roll. You have a choice when you save to Camera Roll if you want to preserve the Metadata from the Foreground or Background. I normally leave mine as background because I'm usually working on current photos. In this case it was not a good idea. 

I normally use the Transfer Photo App to get my photos from my devices to my computer and when I did this I just happened to notice that none, no not one, of my various versions of this edit series was showing on the camera roll to import.

I decided to open the Photo Metadata Reader on my iPad and see what it had to say. The images were right there, the last things I had edited but the date said April 2015. Problem solved, sort of, at least the mystery was. 

I have often noticed, depending on which app you are editing in, it may save your edits back with the original photo. And if that photo was months ago it may get skipped when importing to the desktop. At least that's how Transfer Photo works. 

I may have to go back to using Image Capture (Mac) to pull in my images. One nice thing about Photo Transfer app though is that it shows all your albums so if you're wanting to import all your Hipstamatic shots it's very easy to do. It also has a Drop Box, Google Drive and a Flickr plugin. I'll be checking those out to see if they'll be handy for my work flow.

I am curious, what app are you using to transfer photos to your desktop?

Mobile Art Monday No. 29

My artichokes are beginning to dry so I cut one while it still had color for some shots.

At the last minute I grabbed a black background to see what I could do with it.

Original on the left and first edit in Snapseed on the right.

Second edit in Snapseed with the Retroflex Filters.

Third edit in Stackables adding four layers of textures.

And lastly into Superimpose to add some detail back into the choke.

To do this I imported the Stackables image as the bottom layer. The top layer is the first Snapseed edit so I could eliminate the background. I used the Filter menu to turn it to black and white. Then the masking tool to erase the background with the magic wand. I changed the blend mode to multiply and and lowered the opacity to 15% to get the finished image.

Hope you've all had a great Monday!

Mobile Art Monday No. 27

The Formulas App has an update with great features. You now have access to your custom formulas from Stackables to apply as a filter. You can adjust the opacity then stack on more from either Stackables or Formulas. This gives Formulas a whole lot more versatility. 

My latest sunflower...

On it's own, it was a little ho hum.

This was one time I didn't save my editing information, but I did play around before I settled on this edit. 

I was able, however, to recreate this one.

In Formulas, I imported my original image and chose the far left formulas icon. 

I picked my Yellow Daisy formula (from my Stackables custom formulas which magically show up at the bottom) and lowered the opacity to 70%.

I clicked the checkmark and chose the first option, "apply edits and start new session".

Press the arrow at the top to start adding more effects. By default the Formulas effects are available across the bottom.

I chose the last one, Reminisce, and lowered the opacity to 77%. Then saved to camera roll.

I added a 'sketch layer' to the top image for more definition. This was created in SketchGuru, Simple sketch no. 2.

It was layered over my Formulas image in Superimpose with the blend mode set to multiply 100% to achieve this...

Have a great Monday!

Mobile Art Monday No. 14

We had a large patch of asparagus on the farm where I grew up and it's one thing I will not go with out if I have a big enough spot to plant some. In my book, spring is officially here when I see it peaking from the ground.
My edit for the day…

My original (tweaked a bit in Snapseed)…

My sketch part of my 100 Day Project… (which has absolutely nothing to do with this edit.)

These are a few edits I did in Stackables.

Then I got the idea to layer the black and white over one of the colored edits and blend using Superimpose and got this.

Which gave me the idea to just make a colored texture layer and overlay the black and white.
The easiest way to make a colored texture background in Stackables is take a photo of a white sheet of paper that's not in bright light so it appears a light grey.

 Use it as your photo to add layers to in Stackables until you are pleased with the results and voila! Save it to your camera roll and you have a background to use as a background or a texture layer to layer on top of another photo.

I took this into Superimpose as my background and brought in the textured black and white, set the blend mode to darken and masked out a bit of the corner grunge.

Looking at this now I'm having lots of ideas so I may have to go play some more!

I'm linking up with Kim for Texture Tuesday.