Digital Art is Quick Success

It's like my mom always used to say, "You can't do for one without the others screaming." So instead of going to bed when I got home, which would be the smart thing to do. I made a banner for this blog. With luck I can show you the progression before I dump the scraps from the computer. Keep your fingers crossed that I kept a good record of my work.

You were supposed to keep your fingers crossed. Of course I only saved twice.

Well, at least you can still see what I did. After cropping out all the background crap from the watercolor, I added some filter layers which put a wee bit of a spotlight focus on the forward most plum.

Then I added some overlays from picmonkey's postal collection. Each "stamp" was hand tinted to color match the plums, faded and the eraser tool removed the marks that fell across the plums so that the fruits would continue to stand out. Then a layer of blood splatters tinted to look like spilled paint because that is the idiotic thing that I did in the original painting which I've not known exactly how to work around. So... play up the mistake. And since the blog is called "spilt paint" it seems to make a lot of sense.

After that the corners and the text were the only things to do. Except... I wasn't exactly happy with the flatness. So I added a drop shadow and fiddled with it. Picmonkey lets you adjust all of the shadow elements just like a regular photoshop program. With the color picker tool I was able to keep a harmonious color scheme. Because of the choices I made I was able to make it look like the kind of hand stamped cards I used to do, using double sided foam to add depth. This gave the effect of the stamped postal images being stamped off onto the "scrap" which instead of being thrown away became the matte for the main image. That was a framing trick we employed at work to avoid the waste that otherwise might pile up while making sample cards to send to clients.

I even thought this would be a cool print without all the officious poop that has to compose a blog header. I was quite happy with it at that point. More than I have ever been with the original. Though I do think that I am being quite hard on myself. And should probably stop.