Artwork 00409-00410

Abstractions and variants including photo from USGS bee survey Pseudospinolia Neglecta

This hybrid digital paint/digital photography work is derived from two sources, which I worked up and heavily modified in Photoshop and Filter Forge. One source is a USGS Bee Survey public domain photograph; click the image to open the source page for it:

In the spirit of that work, I release my derivative work (and other works shown here) into the Public Domain.

The other source is output from a Winamp music visualization plugin, MilkDrop:

You can see that the music visualization source is modified almost beyond recognition. In Photoshop, I hue-shifted, super-saturated, and inverted or further color-altered (probably by changing layering modes) regions in patterns using layer masks (or alpha channels, which are similar but different). I actually don’t recall how I got the thumbprint looking stripes, but I suspect I used the India Ink plugin from Flaming Pear, and/or some crosshatch-style filters from Filter Forge. I certainly used the Pen on Watercolor filter.

One of the following images was used (and further tweaked) for the background. The others are variant abstractions I produced along the way.

 

 

I isolated the wasp by inverting the image, using the Unmultiply Filter Forge filter (to remove the black component), inverting the image again, and saving as a .png to preserve transparency.

Other than the technical process, I made this by monkeying around with options until I produced something I liked.

A hoity-toity robot talks about this work at s.earthbound.io/artgib (I don’t like a lot of artist statements that are birthed with undue strains from postmodernism. That robot is a farce of such statements. So you’re aware.)

Syndicated from, original, print and usage options at s.earthbound.io/u