Nature-inspired Art

Home	Field and Swamp: Animals and Their Habitats

Digital Art: Fun things you can do without lifting a pen/pencil/brush

All of these pictures are original art works, using photos I took myself (with the exception of the first photo) and processed using Adobe^® Photoshop^® CS5. They illustrate a variety of features of this versatile software. It's easy to get beautiful effects with the Filters and Image Adjustments. But there are many other diverse and powerful tools if you're aiming for originality.

These pictures show a progression not simply in technical skill but in artistic maturity because of significant events in my personal life. The most difficult challenge an artist faces, I think, is to achieve true self-expression, and sometimes it takes an internal crisis to make that happen.

Please contact me, Dorothy E. Pugh, for the rights to use these photos. All are copyrighted (2012-2013).


A Leafy Experiment, celebrating spring and new optimism.


Sometimes I feel like I'm looking for jewels in the desert when all I want is rain: collages, warping, high feather on the cloud.


Moonlit scene: collage, warping


Spring Spirit: collage, warping and introduction of a human-like figure


Trying for a dreamy effect with a collage and partial opacity


Another collage


A collage


"Activities in a Worried Brain." Just a giant collage, with lots of color changes and some warping.


The Irreversible Mistake: It is a collage making liberal use of the Warp function of the Move Tool.


A collage, selected mainly using the Magic Wand Tool. I realized afterward that this looks as though there's a cross in the background; this was completely unintentional and I will probably crop it further in the future.


This depiction of flowers by a stream was constructed using multiple separate parts of several photos, selected with the Magic Wand Tool with a tolerance of 40. It involved 30 layers.


Friar Laurence in his herb garden. The face for this photo was given to me by another photographer who prefers to remain anonymous (and so does his subject). This is a massive collage, with nearly all the flowers taken from other photos I've taken. The flower Friar Laurence holds in his right hand is a member of the St. John's wort genus (Hypericum), reputed to have antidepressant effects.


This imaginary flower was constructed from several bunches of spicebush flowers, rotated at different angles in separate layers and colored differently. This involved separating the flowers from their background via the Magic Wand Tool.


This started out as a photo of a Gulf Fritillary butterfly.

This portrait is a composite of two very different photos of a man whom I've never met in person and whose appearance I only had a hazy notion of at the time. He donated these photos, which he had taken and processed himself. It's not an especially good likeness, as I found out later, although he told me he likes this one. To make it, I used one layer for each photo, made the top layer semi-opaque, and used the Warp function to get the faces aligned, then used the Smudge and Blur Tools to make the edges less obvious. Finally, I adjusted the colors of the photo using the Color Balance of the Image option in the bottom layer to match those in the top one. 2/20/13

Transformation of a photo presented to the Hack This Photo theme on Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/events/c1bansc7r9r683mcj41gonq95h4


Elephants


Golden Evening	Blazing Noon


Abstract


An imaginary coastal area. Could be farms near an ocean or (more logically) a waterfowl impoundment near a river. This image started out as a photo of the reflections of windows on water, and involved the use of the Magic Wand Tool with the Hue/Saturation/Lightness Image Adjustment function, as well as the Smudge Tool.

Slouching toward creativity.. This, believe it or not, originated in a photo of a stack of tomato plant stands!


Cattails in my local marsh. Filters and adjustments of hue, saturation and color balance were used.


A field at Penny's Bend Nature Preserve, Durham County, NC. I used the Plastic Wrap filter and touched it up with typical image enhancement.

The inside of the Mellow Mushroom restaurant, downtown Winston-Salem, NC. After basic image enhancement, I applied an Angled Edges filter.

The Birding Cat: This image was assembled from "cut-outs" using the Magnetic Lasso Tool from many bird photos and a cartoon of a cat holding a camera, also drawn using basic geometric shapes and the Move Tool, using the Warp function. It used 80+ Layers.

The Process of Photography: A composite of "cut-outs" of many photos and a cartoon face. This used dozens of Layers, each of which required the Magnetic Lasso Tool, the Move Tool (involving generous use of the Warp function), and occasional use of the Eraser Tool.

Imaginary swamp: Lots of "cut-outs" of animals applied to a swamp photo. Note the alligator in the distance.

Flowers, flower flies and bee flies: I had fun with Layer re-ordering to make the flowers seem to lie in a pile.

Karl with a bluebird on his shoulder: This is a "drawing" I did of my husband, Karl Gottschalk, for his Facebook profile photo. He requested the bluebird addition. Much of the work was done with different brush settings. However, his shirt and eyebrows were produced using the Move Tool (with the Warp function) to reshape an ellipse.


Goth Face: This picture used a photo of a window reflection as a starting point and used the Healing Brush Tool almost entirely. However, the Move Tool, the Smudge Tool and the Eraser Tool played minor roles.