Trill-Desktop Com Inspection

Observing the machine.

This evening I was playing with more ambient glow photos, and for the first time ever it was Trill's turn to observe my new desktop computer.

Staring into the window of the machine is like inspecting a spaceship. 

Smile.

Trill was okay with getting a selfie before the machine, proof for showing friends back home that she was on a spaceship.

Nerd Soup- The Disposer

The disposer is a nick name I gave this spiky green guy lurking around the waters of a grave yard.

I felt like doing a bit of photo art with a picture I call Nerd Soup (left). This was from Aug. 1, 2017, a day I was cleaning a bunch of Bionicle parts.

The bowl full of murky water and pieces reminded me of a watery grave, and that tied in with the idea that something could live in those waters which is why there's so much death in it. 

I decided to create a creature for that idea, and called him Disposer. This creature is selected from a photo I took of a friend's Bionicle design a long time ago. He seemed like a fitting creature for the scene, so he got the role.

Editing involved selecting the image, erasing part of his legs, placing him onto the scene, using different kinds of gradients and brush textures, along with the technique of creating a copy layer, applying glowing edges, inverting it, and setting the blending mode to darken. This gave me that painted and partially outlined look.

I also played with different color stages over the image. The version above is the toxic green fog version.

Then there's the dimmed classic monster movie version (left), and also the sepia journal page version (right).

Misty Marine

I continue gravitating towards bright glowing things as scenery with mood lighting. Marine is back, and she's summoning the waters of Radha from the glowing well of wisdom. :P

Okay, yeah, whatever is going on in this scene there's nothing specific to it as far as a story goes. I just felt like doing more mood lighting pictures.

This scene took place on the bathroom vanity with its Chinese evergreen in a shiny pot, reflecting the glow of a Radha beauty defuser that puffed essential cinnamon oil.

With some basic editing like a black gradient, and level adjustments for sharpness and eye glow, I enhanced the mood of my scene.

I played further with my images by experimenting with similar techniques used for creating a watercolor over colored pencil effect on the Lewa and Pearl pictures. 

The left version is the mostly colored pencil effect. I wanted to get more of a brush stroke feel. Since this is a water themed image, I wanted it to look smooth and ripply. The way I did this was by making a copy of the colored pencil version, taking a textured brush in PSE, and applying that texture to the smudge tool set to 100% strength. The rest was just manual touch ups, dragging and dabbing my smudge brush over grainy areas of the image, resulting in a semi painted look (right).