Hello art people at #Hive!... It's February and here we have widespread drought. This has a direct impact on the visual character of the environment, especially when it comes to viewing in places of nature, where colours become warmer, brighter and more contrasting. At the same time, everything is filled with shapes revealed by the drought. The branches of the trees become bare, even the relief is more perceptible thanks to the absence of clouds, also the skies are blue. All this gives me the possibility to take photos full of chromatic diversity and with a lot of shapes and textures. I have used some of these photos (I have placed them at the end of the post) to create a new series of digitally transformed images based on them... This seems to me like a "visual ode" to these February days...

🎨 01

🎨 02

🎨 03

I have tried to convey in each of these digital creations my particular vision of the diversity of everything I see in the landscape around me. Using photographs of nature as a starting point for this creative exercise is something that allows me to evolve the images with the intention of "hybridising" them with the way I imagine these landscapes as they evolve in the most abstract corners of my mind. This is a rather immodest statement, I admit. But I make this clarification because it seems to me that when sharing these creations,is good to accompany it "where is the real origin of them" beyond the technical tools used...

🎨 04

🎨 05

🎨 06

The recipe to create these images from my pictures is very diverse and without a defined "step by step" method. However, the tools used (besides my camera) are one of my old PCs, Photoshop, PhotoScape and Paint. Nothing too sophisticated as you can see, but it's enough for me to spend long hours "painting" on that electronic canvas that my monitor transforms into when I do this.

CREATIVE PROCESS

The transformation process I used to illustrate how I do one of these digital transformations, corresponds to the image 🎨 06... You will be able to appreciate in this one that, I usually switch from one editor to another according to my convenience... There is a lot to say about this process, but its main characteristics tend to be the use of "very manual" tools such as point brushes for lighting, blending, distortion, luminosity and depth... To this I can add the profuse and constant use of layers, which I use to combine the transformed images with each other and generate a certain effect of visual evolution which I like to see in my works...

Choosing the right image is very important. Depending on my creative mood in any particular moment, I usually choose photographs with a lot of diversity of elements in the whole visual plane, this allows me a wide margin of manoeuvre to obtain more complexity in the transformed photo and also provides me with texture to exploit at will using filters as in oil painting for example...

I like to experiment a lot with every picture, the universe of possibilities is infinite even though the tools I use are quite basic... The transformation process is very "handmade" regardless of the fact that it happens on the monitor screen and not on a physical canvas. I like to use filters and brushes with very different settings for them, then the variables for the results shoot up exponentially. This is what led me at one point to use many layers of variations and also to experiment with combining them with each other in all my work.

I have a surprise for you!... On this particular picture (🎨 06) I made a monochrome version transformed!...

I found this an interesting idea, I had to use different vignettes and different light levels. As with conventional photos, black and white work done on digitally altered works requires different adjustments that go beyond simple desaturation...

A BLACK AND WHITE ESSAY...

Elegant, isn't it?... I think I'll make a whole series of monochrome creations in the future!... So you'll surely see this soon!... ;)

THE BASE PHOTOS...

🎨 01	🎨 02	🎨 03

🎨 04	🎨 05	🎨 06

_{ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The pictures are then exported to JPG format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.}

Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!