BeachWalk Driftwood Movie Brush Experiments

I've been trying out some new ideas. I try to walk 5 miles every other day on the beach for exercise, so i've been dragging a digital camera along in the hope i'd get inspired to try something new. So every time i see a piece of driftwood, i've been taking close up pictures of the defects and textures in the surface of the wood. I then took a folder of those images, made a PASeq to do some cleanup and resizing and converted the image folder into a movie. I then used that movie as a movie source brush and tried out some path start regionization ideas in the paint synthesizer.

So i'm generating a picture of the beach out of random textured stuff i find on the same beach. It's taking the concept of how a fractal works and then twisting it somewhat.

The way the textures work out in a final image is also turning out a lot better than i had expected. My initial reaction to the individual photos was 'gee these are pretty boring', and the looks i get from people on the beach watching me take ridiculous pictures of a close up of a dirty piece of drift wood certainly reinforced my initial impression of this particular experiment probably not working out. But in fact i'm pretty happy with how it's all turning out in the end.

I've also been paying a lot more attention to depth of field recently. So the other thing i did with this particular image is used multiple applications of the Sphere Multiplier Ip Op with different random seeds to slightly darken the borders of the final image in a random way. Which focuses the viewers attention to the center of the image. There's a million tricks you can use in Studio Artist to simulate depth of field after the fact so perhaps i should post a new blog tutorial on that subject at some point in the bear term future.

Here's another more abstract experiment shown below using my driftwood movie source brush. The source image is a really stupid picture of an item sold at home depot. Recontexturalizing sterile man made imagery from home depot as organic textures seemed like an interesting conceptual project.



Those of you who follow my photo posts on the Studio Artist User Forum at studioartist.ning.com will notice these 2 images are also posted there as well. Normally that is not the case. The ning RSS photo feed seems to have stopped working yesterday, so i'll be double posting anything posted on the SA forum photo section on this blog as well until that issue gets resolved so that the posts will make it to my aggregation blog at studioartist.tumblr.com and anywhere else that subscribes to that.