Greenspace How-to

Hi, everyone!
I really appreciate your great comments and helpful suggestions. Sue, I know that you're right about focusing away from myself. With all the travel that I do, it's kind of hard to get involved in volunteer work, though. I really don't want the commitment that entails.

But I have been thinking about reviving my Art Challenge, which is something that I do online and can do from anywhere I can get an internet connection. It's hugely rewarding for me to do that, because jolts me and others to do art that we wouldn't otherwise do.

The Greenspace piece -- I'm glad you like it! :) -- I'll see what I can remember about how I did it. The cool thing is that, even if you follow my directions exactly (and I hope you don't), your art will be different from mine! Yours will be your own.

I began with a blank canvas. I put my Gradient tool into Difference Mode and created a 3-color gradient that I really liked. With this kind of art, the colors are somewhat unpredictable, though.

Then I dragged the tool around on the canvas at angles, till I liked what I saw.

The next part, I was playing around with filters. The one that gave me that sparkly look that I love is, believe it or not, Filter > Texture > Mosaic Tiles. I used a small size of tile, and a low number for grout width. Be sure to view this at the size you are planning to output, because that will matter!

I played around with other filters, but was not happy with what they did. One thing that I like to do is to duplicate the original layer, do some filter effect, and then combine this new layer with what I have already done, using a Layer Blending Mode.

Ok so then I was not happy with the contrast, so I used a Curves Adjustment Layer to pump it up.

Then I was not happy with some blue striping that was in there, and the green was too saturated and light. So I used a Hue Saturation Adjustment Layer, running the Hue slider through all its colors. Always do this! You may like what you see! I did. I desaturated the piece a bit, too.

Finally, there was a stripe of black just below the green, and I didn't like it. It occurred to me that the piece overall was too dark, and I'm trying to push myself OUT of the darkness. So I duplicated the layer (again) and cloned some of the orange part into the black area, using a neat scatter brush, sampling often, to avoid patterning.

I did a Replace Color Adjustment Layer, too, to tone down the magenta up in the top left. (Yes, that was magenta!) I like the sort of surprising color that I got there and it spoke to me of joys to be discovered!