Bonnie's challenge this week for
Photo Art Friday was to do an abstract image and I had a lot of fun playing with a photo of a chicken that I shot back in the summer. Happily I can say that I also learned something new in Photoshop Elements while doing it!
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| Mouse over photo to see the 'before' image. |
The first step was to extend the area to the left of the chicken so that I'd have enough room for the text so I copied the left part of the image and flipped it horizontally before using the clone stamp to draw in the extra parts of the chicken wire to create the three triangular 'thingies'. I then played around with the blend mode so that I could change up the colours to make it a more fun, graphic image. Unfortunately, I did so many things to the image, in a trial and error sort of way, that I don't know everything that I actually ended up doing. Suffice it to say I had a lot of fun playing.
I drew in some extra 'hair' to augment the already funky head feathers that she had, and then I found a woman's face on the Internet by doing a Google search for 'blue eye'. This is where I learned something new. When I used the elliptical marquee tool, I discovered that you can click on a box that says 'refine edge' and the dialogue box to the right opens up. From there I was able to feather the edge and adjust the edge detection so that it actually selected a more precise shape around the eye than what I had originally captured with the elliptical marquee tool. In the 'output to:" section I could choose to make the eye selection a new layer and then I just had to move it into place.
Once she had that funky hair and her new and improved eye, I just had to give her a nose job too! I found a clip art nose, which I had to flip horizontally so that it was pointing in the right direction. The next step was to pop in Bonnie's PDPA Faded Fresco texture. I decided to move it into the background and use it as a frame. I rotated the chicken image slightly and then used the eraser tool to remove some of the image along the outer edges so that it wasn't such a stark square and it fit better into the 'frame' in Bonnie's texture.
I said a few weeks ago that abstracts are not my thing, but I had a lot of fun with this! The best part was not having any preconceived notions when I started. One thing just led to the next and the further I got into it, the sillier it became.
Bonnie's challenge this week in Photo Art Friday was to play with a couple of her textures and create an abstract image. I decided to use some more of my 'pinhead kitty' shots from last weekend's shoot. I could see using this as some funky wrapping paper. :o)
This next image, of my dog Casey snoozing on the dock, was taken a couple of weeks ago, the day before we closed up the cottage. Bonnie's challenge for Photo Art Friday was to use her Leafy Landscape texture to create our 'photoartography' (that's my new word for today...Have you read the book Frindle?...just saying...). I started by adding a gradient map to take the original image to black and white. After adding the texture, I added a 'sponge' filter and bumped up the hue/saturation levels. 
This beautiful young gold finch knocked itself into a stupor when it crashed into our cottage window last summer. Fearing that it may die of shock (or become an interest to our dog), I picked it up and held it in my hands to keep it warm. After a little while it was strong enough that it wanted to sit up in my hand but it continued to rest with it's eyes closed as you see here. Finally, after about 30 minutes it started to look around and when I put it closer to a tree limb it flew up into the tree. 
