Aug 31, 2015

Fun with Photoshop - Moving birds and butterflies

As you may know, one of the great advantages of painting digitally is being able to move things around within the image. Of course you can do that in a real oil painting by painting over something and repainting it elsewhere. But that's obviously a lot of work, and destroys the original painting. With a digital painting I can modify things quickly and easily, and still keep the original version intact.

I don't want to go around modifying things for no reason, however. I want to keep even my digital paintings unique. So modifying one just for the sake of a little variation is not what I want to do. But sometimes there's a good reason. Here's an example.


Art Prints

I wanted to put this painting of bluebirds and a yellow birdhouse on various products in my Zazzle store. The printable area on some products is square, some rectangular, some round. This image works fine as is for the square and rectangular products, but not so much for the round ones. Cropping a circle out of the image above would result in important elements being cut off, like this:


Not only is the upper bird's wing cut off, but the monarch butterfly has been cut in half, and the blue butterfly is completely out of the picture now.

So, to make things fit more nicely within a circle, I went back to my original layered PSD file and moved the upper bluebird and the two butterflies in closer to the birdhouse. Now, as you can see below, all the fit neatly on round objects like this decorative porcelain plate...



...or this round accent throw pillow....



...and this wall clock....




So, as you can see, it's not a dramatic change. At first glance it still appears to be the exact same image. So it still keeps the integrity of the original version. Only on closer inspection do you realize things have slightly. This little adjustment is worth it to keep all the important elements within the circle boundaries, making the end result a much nice picture than if I'd simply chopped things off.

See more items with bluebirds and butterflies in my Zazzle Store here.


Aug 22, 2015

Misty Morning Sunrise in October

Thank you to the person in CO who purchased a print of my Misty Morning Sunrise image. This isn't one of my paintings but rather a photo I took right here in our back yard on a chilly, misty October morning. We often get misty mornings in October here in western Washington state. And the dew settles on the hundreds of orb spider webs, making them sparkle. It gets very Halloweenish around here. Not much longer before I'll have an opportunity to get more misty morning Oct photos. Plus, I'm already working on fall and winter theme paintings and products. Wow, hard to believe it's already time to start thinking about the holidays.

Aug 9, 2015

New Pixels Apparel Featuring Animal Art

Pixels.com (aka Fine Art America) has added yet another new product to their line ... clothing! They have apparel for both men and women in various styles and color options, all featuring some of my horse and wildlife paintings.

For men:

For women:


  
I have already made several of my paintings available on all these style choices and will add more from time to time. If you want a particular image that you don't see on the shirts yet, leave a comment here and tell me which image you'd like and I'll be sure to put it up there for you.

Here's a small sampling of what's available so far.




Of course, there even more choices of clothing in my Zazzle Store but, if you are more comfortable making purchases through Pixels/FAA then it's nice to now have that option!











Shop Art Supplies

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