The Last Good Cowboy - Revisited

My recent foray into songwriting was the song "The Last Good Cowboy." It is about a young boy who loves to ride the penny pony ride at the Five and Dime. In the song the boy realizes that at some point in the near future he will grow and be too big to ride the pony anymore. So he rides it as often as he can.

This image uses the guitar motif with an addition of an impression of a young boy riding on one of these ponies. I used a texture I created in TwistedBrush for the background. In Paint.NET I layered the guitars and the texture together. I had applied the Effect> Artistic> Ink Sketch> filter to the photograph of the two guitars and a recliner chair. I then merged the layers and saved the file.

In PhotoPaint I opened my image of the pony ride and applied Little Ink Pot's Thredgeholder filter to it for a sketchy feel. I then copied and pasted it as an object into the guitar image. Using the Object Properties I inverted the pony ride and resized it to fit. I feathered the object and erased around the pony and the little boy. Adding a few paint splatters and my signature I completed the image and saved it at a size for the web.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: Kirk Mathew Gatzka - The Last Good Cowboy
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Lead Belly Music - Guitar Collage

Many people like the Blues, I am one of them. I have a collection called the Essential Blues complete with commentary about the different Blues players it features.

What Blues has done for Rock and Roll is amazing. It is one of the true roots of Rock. From the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin and John Mayall plus countless others, Blues influenced their lives and music.

Here is a collage I did in TwistedBrush and PhotoPaint. I superimposed a picture of Lead Belly in the center and then surrounded him with differing kinds of guitars. I first created a textured background in TwistedBrush, which proved to be too dark for this piece so I lightened it in PhotoPaint using the Tone Curve feature. I added the guitars using the object property of Multiply or Color Burn. Using the Thredgeholder filter I did the sketch like images I put together.

Listening to a little blues by Cale and Clapton.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: JJ Cale and Eric Clapton - Heads In Georgia
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Digital Collage - Classic Fins

I started with Twisted Brush Open Studio to create a grunge back ground. I used the watercolor brushes at differing sizes and changed the canvas type to use different textures on the same back ground. I saved this file.

I reopened it in PhotoPaint and also took a leaf from another grunge background and added two of them. I opened a Dream Cruise photograph of a custom car with fins, not sure if it was a Plymouth or another brand. I resized the image to fit the background. Copying to the clipboard I pasted it into the background file. I used the Thredgholder filter on it for the sketchy appearance. I used the object property on it called Color Burn to add transparency to the car. I merged these.

I used a couple of pieces of Dover clip art and filtered them and applied the object property Multiply to them and dropped them to the background layer. I also added some paint splatters and played with their opacity. I ended up with the piece you see here.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: Amanda Marshall - Everybody's Got A Story
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Grunge Chic - Sweet Decay

Well I joined another forum yesterday. It is called PainterTalk and is for digital artists using Corel Painter and other tools for creative activities.

I have had a warm welcome and hope to learn some more about using my Painter 8 program.

I also downloaded Pixxara's TwistedBrush Open Studio while I was online. I wanted to experiment with another free painter program.

I created the textured background for today's image with it. I have an image I did in ArtRage, another free painter program, that I opened in Painter.NET, yet another free program, and used the Effects> Artistic> Ink Sketch> filter on the image. Copying to the clipboard I pasted it in PhotoPaint where I already had the new background opened.

I stretched to fix the 1024 x 768 texture and used the object property Multiply to add it to the piece. I added some paint splatters and Grunge fonts for interest. Oh yes, I did use the Image> Adjust> Tone Curve to darken the texture I made in TwistedBrush.

All this changing of programs may be unnecessary for others but it stimulates my imagination and I find it a challenge to use the different programs for their strengths.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: Metric - Love is a Place
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