My second digital artwork
After I managed to create something with Paint 3d earlier this week, see this post if you're curious, I still was annoyed by the fact that I can't seem to understand layers in Paint.net. This horror started when (years ago) I tried out doing something (anything!) in Photoshop, and I don't think that I came any further than giving the background a special effect. Then one day I thought that I could understand Paint.net as my boyfriend encouraged me to try it. Every time that I opened it, I was frustrated and disappointed. Today I thought I should browse on the web to learn a few (simple) steps and to my surprise, I started to understand a few things and decided to create my first Paint.net artwork.
Why I was motivated to try Paint.net instead of Paint.3d like the last time is simply because my mind has all these ideas and I want to create things from pictures or images that I've taken to see if I can eventually show the world what I had in mind with them. I'm in no illusion that I will manage to do that today or next week, but until I slowly learn more, I will share every artwork that I find nice enough to share.
Paint.net: the beginning of my journey
Imagine me sitting behind a screen wondering where all these buttons are for? You can tell me that I should read about it before trying it, but then I'd tell you that I'm a person that learns from trial and error and doing it rather than reading about it. I can guarantee you that reading about this without doing it, would make me forget 95% of the information. So let's do it (like Nike) is the best approach even if this means learning with baby steps. Let me show you some of the things I've done to get to this end result.
This is the image that I started with, I actually had in mind to create something digital from the drops as I can see images in them:
The water was taken at a fountain and when I opened the pictures at home on a bigger screen, I saw things in them such as dancing people. I won't go into that further for now as I may want to use that idea for another time. Today I was first seeing what all the effects would bring and take it from there. I discovered an effect that would create fractals from the image and something totally unexpected popped up at my screen. :)
I didn't expect anything like this, I would expect the water drops to change into fractals but apparently, you can magically turn it into all kinds of fractals. I had no idea, a new world has opened today! I decided to use different saturations and make a gif image out of it:
When I saw this flickering gif, I was aiming to find something to add in the middle and create an artwork with movement in it, but after trying out different things, I didn't manage to do so. Too bad, but it's a learning process so I will try again next time. I did feel connected to this work so I thought about something else to place in the middle.
I was struggling to get an image in the layer and discovered that I wasn't the only one struggling here. A quick fix seemed to copy-paste it into the layer, which I did.
I already knew how to blend the two layers as I found this before I discovered how to put an actual image in the layer, so these settings were as needed.
So there's the original picture and the fractalized version of the picture (is that how you call it? Fractalized?). I especially like the dark middle in contrast to the lighter fractals.
I named it: "Behind the darkness, there will be light".
I hope you enjoyed reading about my digital art journey, and hopefully see you back next time!