Lazy Lester - Bluesman

Lazy Lester's portrait is based on another Blue Front Blues Room photograph by John Anderson.

For this image I used Painter 8, Oil brushes and Digital Watercolor brushes. I added the brush texture using the Effects> Apply Surface Texture> Image Luminace settings. I really like the brush stroke texture this created.

Using Painter 8 takes longer than some of the other images I have posted recently. But it is very rewarding and requires more thought and creativity and some skill to make a painterly image.

Lester looks great as he plays the blues. I thought he merited a good image. So I digitally painted this one.

As always I used PhotoPaint to do some adjusting to the image, resizing for the blog, adding my name, etc.

Kent DuChaine - Bluesman

Simply continuing my series of Bluesmen. I have a few more to display. I used PhotoPaint and Paint.NET filters, also adjusting the saturation and the gamma to get the effect shown here.

Again Thanks to John Anderson at Blue Front Blues Room for the photograph.

I spent last night working on a new song titled: "Seeing Things the Right Way". A bit of country in it according to my wife's opinion. She is very kind about most of my songs, some she really likes and this is one of those. I kept the lead guitar very simple on it, and played guitar and recorded the singing using the Shure microphone live. Then overdubbed the lead.

It's theme is giving of oneself in a relationship and asking if the efforts, sometimes hard, are acceptable to the other party. It was great to get a song out! I have been dry musically for some time now. It feels good.

I am happy to be sharing the series of Bluesmen and will add more as I go on.

Emily Druce - Blueswoman

It is nice to find that some women are into Blues as well as the men. Here is another in my series from the Blue Front Blues Room.

From John Anderson's photograph.

Duck Baker - Bluesman

My continuing series of bluesmen from Blue Front Blues Room.

Using PhotoPaint I adjusted the saturation to boost the colors on this image, colors which were already quite cool. I also use some filters to create a more painterly look to this piece.

All of the photographs are John Anderson's from his site. I have his permission to apply my efforts to them to create some distinctive images. He in turn may use them on his site in the future. So it goes both ways, we both benefit from this arrangement. I get good photos to work from and he gets some unique images for his use as well. Pretty great I think!

I haven't been writing much lately, I really have a bad case of the wintertime blues. So I have been low in activity musically but doing more in the area of the digital visual arts. I realy need some warm weather, like many folks I get cabin fever in the wintertime. I have been walking on the treadmill as I listen to CD's, this keeps me somewhat active but it is not like taking a nice walk outside.

So those reading this I hope you are weathering this winter better than I!

Point is to be creative in some way!

Bluesman - Dave Kelly

One more in my series of bluesmen from Blue Front Blues Room. Photograph by John Anderson of the same website.

I used PhotoPaint and KPT's Collection and Thredgeholder plugins to create this image.

Thredgeholder is a plugin from Little Ink Pot that works much like a sketch maker. I use it for the lines in many pieces I do. I run it on an image and copy it to the clipboard then undo the change. Adjust the image to my liking sometimes using KPT's Collection Pyramid Paint filter and PhotoPaint's Alchemy filter.

Then I paste the sketched image back into the piece as an object. I make it transparent, leaving the lines intact, by changing the object properties to "multiply". And drop the object to the background over the filtered image.

This is only one way I may use these steps as my technique. I have other filters and also Painter 8 to accomplish more painterly images.

Bluesman - Ernie Payne

From a photograph by John Anderson. I used PhotoPaint and KPT Collection filters to create this image. My continuing series of bluesmen from Blue Front Blues Room.

Ben Andrews - Blue Front Bluesman

Ben Andrews is a bluesman that is featured on the Blue Front Blues Room site. I have the permission of the owner of that site to do a series of images using my various digital tools.

Here I have used Painter 8 to paint the portrait of Ben. I used Acrylic brushes and Digital Watercolor brushes to create this image.

If you would like to know more about Ben and other bluesmen I will feature here go to Blue Front Blues Room.

I give credit for all the being original images to John's photography work for the site. If it weren't for John's permission I would not have had such a good group of musicians to do portraits of.

Thanks John!

I'm doing a series of ten bluesmen images from this site for the blog. I hope you enjoy the portraits as I am enjoying them.

CorelDRAW Vector Art Samples

I enjoy CorelDRAW's ability to do vector graphics well. On display here is a collage of a few vector drawings I have done using various photographs as a basis for each of the imagea.

I use the freehand drawing tool and map out the basic shapes of the faces and then use fills to color them. The approach is simple enough if you can select the shapes from the shadows and outline them, then chose the right type of fills for each shape.

To show them on the blog I have them saved as jpg files or tif files and reduced them in PhotoPaint for sharing online.

I used Picasa's collage tool again to create this multifaceted image, saved as a jpg file, of course.

Nonrepresentational Abstracts Digital Collage - Picasa 3

As I mentioned in my previous post I have made another digital collage using Picasa 3.

This image shows 188 images piled upon one another, images of nonrepresentational abstractions. It should give you an idea of what type of abstracts I do digitally.

They include use of fractals, painting, cutting and pasting, use of filters and plugins to produce the individual pieces.

You can see a love of color and diversity in my work among these. Though each one is individually crafted and thoughtfully made, this collage makes for a great piece on it's own. I view this collage as emotionally charged with images and colors rampant.

I again recommend Picasa 3 for tracking and making collages of your own digital works. I have yet to make a video, which is also a feature of Picasa 3. I have selected some music for playing in the background I just need to select the images I wish to make into a slideshow. More fun on the way!

Picasa Collage Tool - "Faces"

I have been doing Digital Visual Arts for many years now. I have amassed a collection of my own works that is widely diverse.

I recently have begun using Google's Picasa 3 for keeping track of my digital images, it is a free program and works very well.

One of the features I have been learning is the Collage Maker tool. You select images in any folder (I used select all for my demonstration) then you have Picasa build your collage.

It has a few different models for the collage. Here I chose a mosaic of over 100 images of faces in one folder I have. I have uploaded a 1024x791 pixel image of all these faces. I made the collage larger enough for printing borderless on an 8.5 x 11 Premium Glossy paper.

This image I imported into PhotoPaint to print and then resized for display on the blog. I am really impressed with Picasa's collage tool.

I also made another collage of 188 digital nonrepresentational abstracts as a pile of images thrown on the "canvas". I will also share it in another post.

I recommend Picasa for image tracking and collage making. I haven't used it's other features like making a video yet but will attempt this soon.

Music wise we recieved some old cassette tapes from some friends and I have been reviewing on of the casefuls of mostly 1980's music. ZZ Top, The Eagles, Chicago, and many others. Even some K-Tel collections. A lot of fun to listen to. Mostly upbeat music and funny beats, some with a disco beat like "Saturday Night Fever's" soundtrack.

It is easy to spend time on the PC creating collages and other artwork listening to such music.

Digitally Manipulated/Painted Leo Kotke Image

I found this image of the amazing guitar player singer/songwriter Leo Kotke online. Unfortunately I do not have the photographers name to credit. If you recognize the image please let me know so I can credit the photographer with the base image.

I heavily manipulated the image using Painter 8. I used the Acrylic brushes, Liquid Ink brushes, and Digital Watercolor brushes to create this image.

I altered the image size and added the black border in PhotoPaint for display here. It barely looks like Leo now, but that is who is it.

I recently did two recordings to my list for the "One Tough Baby" CD I have been working on. One Rock instrumental using the chords A D E and E7, like a fast blues tune with lead. I wrote another song called "Dance Away", a happy little tune about being joyful and up beat.

I've been working on the map project again and enjoying that challenge as well.

Abstract 12-String Guitar

I think I have guitars on the brain. I played around with this image and created a unique piece of an abstracted 12-string guitar. Another Takamine guitar only much different than the real one.

I did the background in Painter and the cutting and pasting in PhotoPaint. I do so enjoy making such images.

I recorded "Yes It Is" by The Beatles most recently and also wrote a song about "Acceptance". Having a good attitude toward wellness when one is limited by health issues is vital to one's overall health.

I want to do another Rock song but haven't come up with any ideas for one as of yet. I enjoy using the "Gearbox" software with the Toneport UX1, utilizing the many guitar styles to produce various songs. It is very versatile with many presets of differing guitar tones and amplifiers. Many have hilarious names that make you want to experiment with them. Some are great while others are just plain strange and don't fit any style I'd use.

Experimentation is very playful and challenging to produce a sound that is even and warm or raw and hot. It is good fun. I really like this combination.

One problem I have is on dialup I cannot download the latest version of "Gearbox" software from Line 6's website. I have tried and the diaulp connection is just too slow as it is a very large file, somewhere in the vicinity of 66 megs. So I can't find out what I am missing. Probably a good thing. Too much time spent playing and other things suffer.