Rain! Heat ...Stuck inside.

Maybe my heart is in creativity in all shapes and forms.

I am not talented in drawing or painting. However I can make excellent stick figures and cartoonish figures.

Cartoon I did for Mules and More Magazine years ago. See? I can draw a line!

I read some articles debating the use of AI Art and some other articles which discussed the positive uses for AI in doing graphic art and commercial art. 

I've experimented so far with two AI generators. NightCafe and wombo. Both are free, both can be done from your computer or your smartphone. 

These are the simple AI art things a person can do.

I like to delve even further into the realm of 'interesting-ness'. I admit. It can be ho-hum and sort of pretty in a strange way. But since I was stuck with evading the heat and humidity, I thought I'd dabble in another form of abstract art. 

I went on a Horse kick and got this:

I mean most of this looks pretty and abstract. So I decided to get creative.

I combined two 'creations' from a photo of my favorite box elder tree in the winter.

I typed in Tree Ents for one image and Tree Ents with cottages for the second image using the above tree as a base image.

I combined the two to create my own mystical Tree Cottage.

It looks like some strange house straight out of a story like the Hobbit.

I can see where an AI application like this could be used to create a book cover, an album cover, or even perhaps a poster. [Each of the sites do offer prints for a pretty nice price and offer a way to sell your artwork as an NFT.] 

I could see this as a book cover!

I really wanted to create something with a horse in it so I went over to Nightcafe and started experimenting.

This looked like freaky flying horses with red farts.

It was not something I wished to work with. The one below looked vaguely like Wrath Horses stuck in a Swamp of Sorrow. 

The one below involved the words: Horses, clouds, angels, wings, 

...and something strangely creepy, but it held my attention with a ... 

This IS It!

I wanted something more dark and strange.

This was the original.

Here is the final edit.

I stopped right here because this exemplified what I thought was the definition of 

a

Nightmare.

Okay, this is not for everyone at all. I mean it has a certain scary awful dystopian feel to it. It is dark and a bit frightening.

I like scary movies though and this really resonated with me. It was all created with just words and then run through Artificial Intelligence and a Neural Network.

Let's end on some happy and cheery doodles.

Steam Punk Flowers and Clouds

What the dashboard of creation looks like:

Tropical Beach Cheerful Lifeforms...
I don't see the life forms, but at least it is cheerful and in the rather fantastical and weird style of Kincaid paintings. The colors are pretty, but I don't see any beach!

Garden & Photoart

First the boring news. Part of our old garden got tilled and I nearly burned my nekked feet trying to plant corn and a few other veggies. It is dusty and dry with no rain in sight. 

It is a small garden and getting up to water it predawn is not a bad chore. I'm going to buy my other fresh veggies at the Farmer's Market in town and privately from a woman that does vegetables as a business.

With the extreme heat, I needed a place to cool off. So Bear had me take out the kiddy pool.

Charlie hates the pool. I've sat in it to cool off and it makes a good place to stick bare feet after scalding them in the hot dirt.

Okay. PhotoArt. Artsy fartsy. I saw an ad on FB that had the photographer willing to 'teach' any person 'How to take artistic flower photos and get that dreamy effect'. He was also selling something called Overlays. This would be a layer to put 'over' a photo and 'create' the dreamy effect.

The Overlays were pretty pricey but really sort of neat. The 'course' was all about Creative Suite and how you could use overlays to 'create' better photos. It was expensive. [Wait...Create Better Photos? Don't you have to start out with a good one first????]

I am one of those that tries to figure things out myself. 

I went all out with a free paint program and a water color overlay I nabbed from the internet. It was not the effect I was looking for but I liked it enough to keep it. It is a geranium on my porch.

Next? Verbena in a pot with lavender behind it.

No overlays though. I used levels and curves in Corel PSP to bring the photo to emulate High Key. I added a layer and used a motion blur and used the layer setting to Screen. I erased or removed parts of the light colored layer to reveal just a few flowers.

I added a white vignette around the photo and I was done.

So I thought about overlays. Here is a sample of an overlay. 

Most of the overlays being offered in 'bundles' are bokeh, stars, clouds, rain, snow, and what not.

So I 'made' a couple in my old PS program.

So why on earth would you use an overlay?

I used the green one here just for kicks to see what would happen. I wanted it so subtle that I didn't want it obvious. I'm experimenting to see if I can really do something neat and cool.

I used the purple overlay here in PS to brighten this shot, it was pretty neat.

Here is an overlay that was another photo that was blurred. Interesting how it changes the 'look' of the shot.

My final choice was to go with the purple overlay.

Now the ones you can buy are totally cool. You can add soap bubbles, stars, and soft clouds. I like to dabble in the artsy fartsy stuff once in a while.

Still, I wasn't 'making' the Art that I saw in the ad [no I just stared at it and scrolled on by]. But maybe I should take an artsy class just once to see. I don't know how to tell if it is a scam or for real.

[I have taken two classes. Fine Art Black & White and Still Life. Both were good learning experiences.]

One of my old art edits:

I made this one into a greeting card.

Last is my purple overlay/soft contrast effect for a Still Life shot from our horribly hot HOT day.

My super cool hat along with my flowers set on that ugly trunk I wanted to get rid of. 

Original:

Edit:

I'm curious about learning new methods, but extra edit time isn't always what I want to do.

So I don't always do Artsy stuff. But I like to challenge myself to always learn something. 

After all, I did read tuts and watch vids to learn how to do OOB years ago and that really WAS fun! I'm not sure I have the patience for that intense editing anymore.

Eddie in Out of Bounds:

I'm not sure where I will go next with PhotoArt. But I will keep trying new things. I don't want this old brain to go stagnent.

Editing ~ Creative Stuff

I started doing photography and felt that every photo just had to be perfect and straight out of the camera as I saw it.

I joined Flickr and started seeing other photographers doing editing and other things to photos, I met those who did abstract computer art, and... suddenly my world started to expand.

I began to learn the basics photoshop, GIMP, and other programs. I tried most anything I could get my hands on. Yesterday I came across something in my searches called 'Paint with Light Effect'. I decided to check it out.
I'd done Painting with Light at night and had a lot of fun. However, I don't often go out late at night and do photography.

It has been fun, and so I wondered what this new Painting with Light was.

However, it was not what I expected. It was painting light within a photo to dramatically change a photo.

I happened on something called the Briscoe Lighting Effect.

Tony Kuyper covers this in his WordPress blog and has a short video regarding the method that uses CreativeSuite by Adobe. I can't afford the CS by Adobe and I don't like 'renting' a program and paying for it monthly.

I started using ON Photo, the free version after Adobe went to a pay monthly fee. I kept my version of CS2.  I eventually went for ON1 RAW and I like the program. I own it and can upgrade if I want. It is a bit easier than CS, but it is not as creative.

All that gobbledygook aside, I thought I'd take some techniques and try to use them in ON1 RAW.

Here is the original photo:

Pretty boring isn't it? This is not what I imagined it to be as my eye saw the sunlight just barely coming in from the far side of the stream.

I also wanted the photo to have a dreamlike quality to it.

After a lot of missteps and start overs, I stopped here. Yes, this is what I wanted.

I edited the specific colors in the far end of the stream. I also used a texture layer to darken the sides and one more cloud layer to put the reflection of the sky in the water.

It isn't realistic, but it was something I saw in my mind's eye when I took the shot.

Here is what the ON1 editing program looks like and why it is SO easy to work with.
No, they do not pay me to talk about their programs.

I'd met someone recently who had told me how lost she was when using CS/Adobe Elements and layers.

Here is ON1 with the same photo, but I am editing it to be a black and white photo.

The original shot was pretty unimpressive too. But I wondered how it would look transformed in Black and White. I brightened the yellows, the oranges, in the color enhancer and then shifted it to Black and White and played with the sliders.

Besides ... X marks the spot.

I took this next shot and of course did some more play with it.
Color:

Sigh. It is nice but...

Black and White:

The leaves stand out in this shot, where they really didn't in the color version.

Next up?

I watched a video on how to composite a fantasy scene.

I will have to use both ON1 and CS2 for that. It is a great challenge.