I was having a conversation with a friend today about brand as applied to personal image, and realized that if I took off my glasses and shaved my beard that no one would probably recognize me. 🙂
tags: beard, self, image, brand, wordpress, postaday2011, open source, creative commons
Here we have a man on fire. A poetic, metaphoric, and timely self-portrait.
In the GIMP, I imported the silhouetted image of the man, along with the flame image. In order to combine them, I put the man as the top layer, and set the layer style to “screen”, which keeps the white of the upper layer, but let the flames come through wherever the black occurred. It’s a simple, but very powerful technique when you want to quickly combine the contents of two layers.
tags: fire, man, silhouette, GNU, GPL, GIMP, open source, creative commons, CC-SA, share, 365. lemasney, postaday2011
This is another in the series of predetermined captions. Nancy McMillin was kind enough to suggest the phrase “Don’t just sit there with your teeth in your mouth” and this is almost exactly what I pictured when I read the line.
In the GIMP, I brought in a picture of myself, and a picture of some gnarly teeth. I selected my jaw from the photo, then cut and pasted it as a new layer. I placed the teeth behind the hole where my jaw had been, by placing that layer behind my photo. I rotated the jaw layer and moved it below the teeth in the image, as the top most layer. I worked to recreated the goatee in a the image by cloning.
If I did it again, I’m sure I could make it more believable, but one sketch a day makes time a luxury. I’m sure I’ll use the technique in future sketches. Thanks, Nancy, and everybody please keep the captions coming!
So this is just a series of layers with different brushes used on each to create a scene. I created a layer in the background of sky color and painted into it with grassy notes. I added a transparent layer on top of that and placed some cloud brushes on it. I added another transparent layer and placed a woodland brush on it. I created another transparent layer and painted a single tree on it using a different brush. By keeping the layers separate I was able to adjust and edit each conceptual layer without affecting or destroying the others.
tags: clouds, trees, woodlands, sky, grass, nature, GIMP, gnu, gpl, open source, creative commons, cc-sa, lemasney, sharing, postaday2011, 365
This self-portrait is a result of a great suggestion by my friend Angel who said:
“Pick any photo image you have (can be yourself) and make it look like an oil painting on canvas.”
Thanks for the suggestion, Angel! I used my webcam to capture images of myself from some interesting angles and lighting situations. Then, I used one as a base image in the GIMP to first color-pick then paint into with different brushes using a Wacom tablet. It was a lot of fun to ruin the perfect forms of photography and replace it with the warmth and approximation of painting. I’ve done this a few times before in different ways, but this was a very direct, very freeing method.
tags: Wacom, self-portrait, image, identity, painterly, 365, daily, postaday2011, GIMP, GNU, GPL, Open source, creative commons, CC-SA
This is an image I created of Atlas, the mythical figure who held the world upon his shoulders. I most often depict him after he has dropped, thrown, or cast the world off, which I think is an interesting concept. I also wanted to show the Gestalt visual principle of closure, where the human mind will create an image of something that is not present if given enough clues. You’d agree that I have not actually illustrated Atlas himself, but rather the negative space that Atlas might fill. I decided to focus on designing the background space to help you to see the figure Atlas in the negative space. In the GIMP, I used an image of a bodybuilder to create a selection to mask the figure’s space, then I hid that image’s layer. Then, I began painting on a few overlapping transparent layers, all the time keeping the selection present to keep the figure’s contour. The result is what you see here.
tags: fantasy, myth, mythical, atlas, world, GPL, GNU, GIMP, open source, creative commons, sharing, free, lemasney, postaday2011, 365