1. Artlab : Collaborative Artmaking

An opportunity for users to learn and watch the process of digital art making and engage in open discussions with artists from around the world. An opportunity for users to learn and observe how to process digital art within software programs such as photoshop. Artist’s are invited to apply for participation by contacting course director at giznad@ozemail.com.au.

2. Email sent to artists

Dear ArtLab artists,

Welcome aboard!

Here are the names of those artists participating in this project:

1. John Labadie (30 May to 06 June)

2. Wayne Cosshall (06 June to 13 June)

3. Tom Chambers (13 June to 20 June)

4. Margie Labadie (20 June to 27 June)

5. Joe Nelvern (27 June to 04 July)

6. John Holloway (04 July to 11 July)

I think you all more or less know each other.

Here is some background information behind why I am directing this project. (if you have read previously .... apologies - new bits have been added)

I have been commissioned to write and facilitate some online art courses for Arts Queensland who provide online education for people living in remote and regional areas here in Australia... a large demographic of around 10 million people in regional locations. About 10% currently undertaking online study.

One of the units I am presenting is an art collaboration where I invite special people like you, to contribute to a work and passed between 6 people. It will function as a linear process - 1st artist completes then it is sent to the 2nd artist and so on. The twist (or interesting part) will be that I ask each of you to take a couple of screen shots of your process as well as writing a short statement/description about what you did. Each artist will have a week to play before sending back to me. Your creative process can be as much or little as you want.

I will provide the source material. Everyone is more than welcome to keep and use their ﬁnished image however you are not permitted to keep or use the source material beyond this project as it is copyright Mr Danzig. This project will have 6 images to display with screen shots and descriptions/statements. It will be a wonderful insight to how 6 established and fabulously talented artists approach (digital) mark making. Ultimately it will be something I hope ﬂying art students will engage sometime in the future.

I will moderate the project. There is no need to communicate with the others if you don’t want to.

There will most likely be some interaction from arts students asking the odd question... if this happens I will forward to you as they come in.

All in all it’s a simple, clean project with good PR and exposure for everyone. It will be available online - it may also be on Wayne’s new dimi website (if you wish to display project please contact me)

Process:

1. Everyone will receive the original source images (attached to this email)

2. You can reintroduce 1 or all of the source images in your process

3. You can add only 1 source image of your own

4. You may NOT forward your source image to other artists

5. Remember to include at least 2 screen shots of the work in progress including layers, Channels, history palette (they must be open and visible to see)

6. You must include a short description of your process.

7. You have 1 week to complete and then send back to me (see dates next to your name and please try to keep to the time-line - contact me asap if you cannot meet your time-line)

8. Keep resolution to 72 dpi

9. Keep the image size at 1000 X 900 pixels and compress at a value of 9 when saving to jpg.

10. Software to be used is CS (“the artist formerly known as Photoshop” *wink*)

11. Please provide one paragraph bio on yourself with urls

Any problems please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Best

Steve Danzig

http://www.internationaldigitalart.com/

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE

This e-mail message and any documents attached hereto may contain information that is conﬁdential legally privileged and exempt from di�e-mail or delete and discard all copies of the e-mail. Thank you.

Source images ... created by Steve Danzig

Artist 1

John Antoine Labadie Bio 2005

John Antoine Labadie originally trained, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, as a sculptor and painter. Since then Labadie has worked professionally as an industrial engineer, teacher, scientiﬁc illustrator and photographer, writer, editor and graphic artist for newspapers, magazines and academic journals. Labadie holds an interdisciplinary doctorate from the College of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning at the University of Cincinnati. In the last decade Labadie’s art works have been shown in more than 200 �UNC Pembroke since 1994, is the founder of the digital arts program and serves as director of the UNCP Digital Academy: a multi-departmental collaboration offering undergraduate new media courses and creative and technical media services. Dr. Labadie is a 2005 Fulbright Scholar at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan. John is most happliy married to Margie Beth Labadie, creative collaborator and fellow gardner.

http://www.uncp.edu/art/labadie/index.htm

http://www.steppingstonearts.net/

JAL ArtLab narrative

1. Firs�tive, non-rational basis).

2. I see many and varied things in the “seed” images ... some are clear and some are less so. The colors are “in the way.” What to do?”

3. I’ve decided to use image>adjustment>threshold as a way of seeing the essential structure of the images Steve has sent.

3. I ﬁnd a sense of “species” in one of the images ... i will go with that.

4. Another of the images reminds me of the Columbia river and the “salmon ladders” there.

5. The “threshold” version of the ladder-form even appears to have schools of ﬁshes. i had not expected to be so ﬁgurative/literal -- but there it is.

6. i have combined the “cleaned up” images to make my ﬁsh travel in what appears (to me) to be a relatively deep space ... like those salmon ladders in Oregon.

7. Next question: Where will it go?

Note: In the end i used only two of the provided images. I modiﬁed them radically as far as color goes but only minimally in terms of structure. I did not introduce any imagery of my own into the process.

Artist 2

Wayne J. Cosshall

Well, the ﬁrst thing that I did was to open up John Labadie’s image and the source images and have a good look. From this I could see the direction John had gone but decided I wanted to work more of the source material back in and work with more colour. The source images and especially the long corridor-like structure suggested to me a meeting place, like around the coffee machine at work. So I dragged the entire source material on top of John’s image and played with the order a bit. I then went and browsed through some of my source images looking for something suitable to add to the ‘dialog’. I ended up with on of the pieces I rendered with software I had written.

With all the components as layers I next decided to make use of the strong perspective in the image. So I transformed my added image to give a perspective effect. I then masked out parts of my image so that it would integrate. Now the background colours were too strong so some work with blending modes and transparency got the background sitting where I wanted. Next was an adjustment to the ‘ring’ rainbow to make it more obvious and I was happy with the result.

If I was going to deconstruct meaning in this image I would do it as follows. From John’s starting image I see a strong ﬁsh motif in a dominant position in a manmade building. So this led me to thinking along ecclesiastical lines. I thus chose to emphasise this with the ‘scarlet’ robes of a cardinal that one of the source images reminded me of. My introduced image can be interpreted in two opposite ways, a contradiction that I wanted to introduce. The three-way symmetry of the object can be interpreted as a reference to the holy trinity of Christian dogma and the colour space of the object suggesting sackcloth. It could thus been seen as representing oath of poverty in some orders in conﬂict with the ostentation of the cardinals. The other interpretation, given the ‘natural’ aspect of the introduced object is as a reference to pagan triple-Goddess worship and thus the conﬂict becomes one between resurgent paganism and Christian orthodoxy. The rainbow was used to pull the attention to the interaction between the two foreground ‘personalities’.

Final Image

Artist 3

Tom Chambers

Description/process:

Moved Cosshall’s image into PhotoShop; reduced it by 50%; copied the central portion of the image with the elliptical marquee tool; layered it to ﬁt into the “halo” image provided by Danzig’s image bank; ﬂattened layers; used liquify ﬁlter to morph the image �image provided by Danzig’s image bank; used color balance and bright/contrast adjustments to coordinate and enhance the color scheme; saved as .jpg at #9 compression to generate the image, “Marble/Planet Hall”.

Bio:

Tom R. Chambers, a Documentary Photographer and Visual Artist for over thirty years, is currently working with digital generation as an art form under the namesake of Pixelscapes, which begins to approach a true abstract, visual language in Digital Art.

This Minimalist approach and Its Derivatives ( Scan Series and Shift Series) have been exhibited in the U.S.A., England, Australia, Russia, the Philippines and Brazil. He has exhibited his Documentary Portraiture and Visual Arts throughout the U.S.A. and worldwide (over forty exhibitions); and his mixed media and interactive work, Mother’s 45s (a tribute to his mother and all �seum of Contemporary Art, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A.

Am�March, 1986 issue. And his Photodocumentary project, Descendants/350, received a Governor’s Proclamation, and was accepted by the Secretary of State as a part of the Rhode Island State Archives (U.S.A.).

His Photodocumentary project, Southwest of Rusape: The Mucharambeyi Connection was ofﬁcially opened by the U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe and accepted as a part of the United States Information Services (USIS) Archives, Harare, Zimbabwe, Africa; and his Photodocumentary project, People To People was accepted as a part of the Kumho Art Foundation Archives, Gwangju, South Korea.

Chambers also completed a three-year tour as Art Conservator and Curator for the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and as the Initiator/Instructor of The McEwen Photographic Studio for the National Gallery’s Art School. The Gallery also invited him to exhibit his Visual Arts project, Variations On The Dan Mask, which was ofﬁcially opened by the U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe.

Hope the above will sufﬁce. Take care.

Final image

Artist 4

Margie Labadie

bio

Margie Beth Labadie teaches in the Digital Arts area of the Art Department at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, USA. She has an MFA in Printmaking from East Carolina University and a BA in Art from Temple University, Philadelphia and Tyler School of Art in Rome. Margie Labadie merges traditional and digital printmaking techniques, and combines physical objects with printed images to make 2D collages and 3D assemblages. Bird imagery is the main vehicle through which she depicts themes of war, love, separation and heroism. Avian photographs, printed feathers, wishbones and broken eggs are combined with torn love letters, medals of valor, old cigarettes and cigar boxes to evoke the memories and mythologies of the war torn years of the early 20th century. Many of her works comment on humankind’s use of birds throughout recorded history.

process

I�ing lines is predictable and mundane. The marble seems to contain an image, but because it is so small, it is unreadable. It if is meant to be abstract, I ﬁnd it too small and in too much contrast with its surroundings to hold weight in the image.

The ﬁrst changes I made were to remove the high contrast colors from the converging line pattern and marble. By selecting color ranges, I removed the black, blue, and green respectively, (all at a fuzziness level of 171) leaving a matrix composed of the left overs of the image.

I created a white layer so I could see the image better. Now I had a glass box matrix with a clear marble inside.

Most of my art work tells stories through combining images I collect, photograph, draw and scan. The marble in the matrix did not tell any kind of story to me. It seemed more like an exercise in Vaserely op-art.

So a��ever the image I imported, it had to direct the viewer to the marble. I imported an image of an bird’s eye that seems to be looking into the box and at the sphere.

The mat�red bars at the top and the blue bars on the left bleed off the edge of the image.

I adjusted the color of the marble by selecting it and used hue/saturation to bring in more yellow. Then I used Inverse to select the matrix and adjusted the colors of the matrix to be cooler.

Finally, �slight gaussian blur.

Done.

On the next person!

Final Image

Artist 5

Joe Nalven

Re: ArtLab Project/Flying ArtsQueensland

New Title for Image: The Sighting

Steve:

Okay, here it is. Here is my part of the ArtLab project. Included in this email are the following:

1. A Bio (please note that the correct spelling of my name is Nalven) with URLs.

2. A short description of the creative process. (The extended version is more robust, but if your space is limited, this version IS shorter.)

3. A more extended description of the creative process should you want more detail.

4. Six screen shots that include the image with the history palette, layers and channels. These are captured with SnagIt.

5. One ﬁnal image (still at the same size that was sent to me), retitled as The Sighting.

If you need anything else, please let me know.

You’ll be interested in seeing the variation JD Jarvis and I used in our forthcoming book, Going Digital: The Practice and Vision of Digital Artists (Thomson – Course Technology, August 2005). The series editor is Harald Johnson. It will be launched with a book signing at SIGGRAPH in LA. If you are interested in reviewing it (for DIMI, IDAA or other channel of communication), let me know and I will add your name to the list I send to the publisher. Please send physical address for mailing.

Best,

Joe

Bio

Joe Nalven is the co-author of Going Digital – The Practice and Vision of Digital Artists, August 2005. He also edits the Digital Art Guild webzine, www.digitalartguild.com that features articles on digital art and technology. His own art and thoughts are found on his personal website, www.digitalartist1.com. Joe also co-moderates the Yahoo Digital Fine Art Group.

Joe’s interest in digital art builds on his early training in technical drawing, which evolved over 25 years into a self-taught collage style using scissors, a glue-stick, cut out photos and drafting. He furthered his compositional interests using photography in his ethnographic research in Colombia, Mexico and the United States. Since the late 1990s, he began expanding his image-making with the interplay of digital photography and digital imaging inside Photoshop. Along with many other digital artists in San Diego, California, he has worked to develop community interest in digital art. His interview on ArtRocks can be heard on WSRadio that has been archived at:

Short Journal

Journal for Danzig’s ArtLab Project – Flying Arts Queensland

June 26, 2005

I opened up the image, and adjusted the size and rez in order to print the image. I can think about the this image better with a hard copy – maybe not ‘better’ but simply see it in a different light.

June 28, 2005 – part 1

I loaded a dance image and played around with it, erasing some of the background and comparing blend modes. I then worked the color harmonics of each layer, using Selective Color differently on each layer to enhance the depth with the contrasts between both layers. I followed this up with curves and color balance. I went back and erased some more of the top layer to eliminate some of the softness without having to select with such exactitude that I would lose the sense of the contrast, especially since the dancers movement was itself blurred in the original photograph. (See screen shot 1.) This was a very preliminary attempt at collaging another image into the one I received. Time to give it a rest and go back to the ‘original’ image (‘original’ meaning ‘my starting point.’)

I decided to try another tack. Instead of going ‘human,’ I thought I would try texture and shape. I often take pictures of textures and objects. A tree is an object when the distance between the camera’s eye and the tree is sufﬁcient to make out the shape of ‘tree.’ But when the photo becomes a macro, the tree-object gives way to texture. I chose an image of a wall with shadows falling across the wall and used the Transform tool to shape the picture to meet what I thought might be a good integration with the received image. And this shape fell closer to the object-end of the continuum rather than the texture-end of it.

I went along several paths. First, I posterized one layer and transformed it yet again as well as trying out the various blending modes. On yet another layer, I used the ‘minimum’ setting on Other Filters (just down from the High Pass Filter). I transformed this layer as well and worked the various blending modes. I also swapped the several layers (except the base layer) in whatever permutation came to mind. (See screen shot 2.) The idea is to provoke shape and color changes.

June 28, 2005 – part 2

While I was resting, getting ready for an evening dinner out with friends, I remembered another fascination that I worked with, but hadn’t evolved completely. I was interested in taking photos of people with glasses from the back so that I would see through one of their lenses as well as a slice of their face. I grabbed one of these photos and moved it into the received image. My thought was that I could have a person looking towards the eagle’s eye while the eagle was looking towards this person – with the marble in the middle. A story was evolving. The 3D space was a radiating and colorful place behind which the eagle looked into; what if a human was looking into the 3D space in reverse of the eagle – kind of transpecies contemplation. And, of course, the mysterious marble ﬂoats in between the human and eagle staring across this wonderful 3D space. That’s a good start to help crystallize my evolving of the received image.

After moving the face into the received image, I used the Transform Tool to make the face smaller and to position it relative to where I thought it might go. I clipped out the eye pieces (upper and lower) and saved the lower portion to reuse at a lower opacity, letting the marble bleed through. When I moved the face over, I realized that I hadn’t cropped the image down and so I had some of the face image still left. I can cut that out when I continue the process. (See screen shot 3.)

June 29, 2005

I began to attack the side face in a variety of ways. First, I was bothered by the mottled skin and began to move the face from photo-realistic to a painterly style. As a general practice, I use two layers (instead of ‘masks’): revise the bottom layer and then reduce the opacity on the upper layer or erase away parts of the upper image to allow the lower level to blend with it. I often repeat this step with other ﬁlters (such as palette knife, cutout, posterize, dust and scratches – which I used in this image). I also used the Channel Mixer to change the face into black and white and then, when using Curves, reintroduced color as tonal blocks – like duo-tones expanded into each of the segments created, say, by Cutout. I also used the High Pass Filter – way to the extreme – to not only sharpen the edges, but also to intensify blotches of color, especially in the rim of the glasses. (See screen shot 4.)

The side face is taking on the kind of density of color, shape, and location that in my mind works with the received image – as an evolution of the collage within my own storyline. Now I need to work with the received image and bring it out with more intensity and brightness. My thought at this point is not to change it other than to give it more pop relative to the side face and glasses. I added a touch of a dispersed drop shadow to give a hint of depth to the side face. I also copied part of the lower lens area and pasted it on the top part of the lens (which I had failed to do early on – so this is a ﬁx). I adjusted it so that it would ﬁt reasonably into that area and erased away the overlap.

I re-energized the received image by using Curves and Selective Color – the ﬂat and somber colors (at least on my monitor) was reinterpreted to be far more intense. Selective color also allows that adding of black in each of the colors selected. This creates a much richer and deeper color. I went back into Selective Color and added more black and reduced the brightness of the white in the bird’s feathers. (See screen shot 5.)

Time to start the process of ﬁnishing the image. First, I went over the edge of the side face and glasses with the Smudge Tool. This softened the edge and smooshed the colors along the edge and eliminated some of the obvious over sharpening. I had previously given up on a photo-realistic side face and glasses so the smudging simply added to the painterly effect. It also results in crushing of pixels so that any print with not be pixilated or have jaggies. I decided to add some inner shadow as part of the Effects and erased away the darkening on the lens of the glasses. This added to the differentiating of the face from the underlying image in the collage. (See screen shot 6.)

Finishing up. After merging the layers, I added a Layer Style, both Bevel and Emboss (with colors found inside the image) and a single pixel Stroke on the inside of the image. The edges of the collaged image needed a bit of tightening or cohesion, especially since there were repeated white spaces (the feathers) alternating with the architectural spokes.

I’ll ﬂatten the image and give the image a new title: The Sighting. I’m bothered by the awkward shape in the lower right hand corner as the face is overlapped by the glasses. Kind of a bump that looks out of place. I went in with the Smudge Tool and made that line more even and then reﬂattened the image and saved it as the ﬁnal (at least for now).

Extended Journal

Journal for Danzig’s ArtLab Project – Flying Arts Queensland

June 26, 2005

1. I opened up the image, and adjusted the size and rez in order to print the image. I can think about the this image better with a hard copy – maybe not ‘better’ but simply see it in a different light.

2. Before I got the image, I suspected that it would lack human ﬁgures and my suspicion proved correct. My thought would be to give strong consideration to including the human ﬁgure in some way. One thought was to include dancers. I like to photograph dancers, among other objects. Dance gives interesting motion images. (I’ve been relying more on my digital camera. For the past year, I’ve been using an Olympus C5050Z with a wide angle extension lens.)

3. In looking at the image I received, I found the marble in the eye disconcerting, less so with the bird’s (eagle? Was that Margie’s image?) eye. It might be tiresome in removing the marble; it could be disguised or minimized with the superimposition of human dance ﬁgures.

4. Another thought about the image I received. I liked the real-surreal quality of the image, along with its 3 dimensionality.

June 28, 2005 – part 1

5. I loaded one dance image and played around with it, erasing some of the background and comparing blend modes. I then worked the color harmonics of each layer, using Selective Color differently on each layer to enhance the depth with the contrasts between both layers. I followed this up with curves and color balance. I went back and erased some more of the top layer to eliminate some of the softness without having to select with such exactitude that I would lose the sense of the contrast, especially since the dancers movement was itself blurred in the original photograph. (See screen shot 1.) This was a very preliminary attempt at collaging another image into the one I received. Time to give it a rest and go back to the ‘original’ image (‘original’ meaning ‘my starting point.’) Note: when I work on adjusting color, whether in Curves, Selective Color and the like, I generally go through the subsets – whether Red, Green, Blue separately or as RGB combined in Curves, or the color gamut plus white, neutral and black in Selective Color, or Shadows, Midtones and Highlights in Color Balance, and so forth.

6. I thought about expanding the image as a diptych or making it into a panorama. However, the size limit imposed in this exercise would require some thought about creative matting/framing to compensate for the variation between the change in the internal image size and its surrounding ﬁll. Well, something more to think about.

7. I decided to try another tack. Instead of going ‘human,’ I thought I would try texture and shape. I often take pictures of textures and objects. A tree is an object when the distance between the camera’s eye and the tree is sufﬁcient to make out the shape of ‘tree.’ But when the photo becomes a macro, the tree-object gives way to texture. I chose an image of a wall with shadows falling across the wall and used the Transform tool to shape the picture to meet what I thought might be a good integration with the received image. And this shape fell closer to the object-end of the continuum rather than the texture-end of it.

8. I went along several paths. First, I posterized one layer and transformed it yet again as well as trying out the various blending modes. On yet another layer, I used the ‘minimum’ setting on Other Filters (just down from the High Pass Filter). I transformed this layer as well and worked the various blending modes. I also swapped the several layers (except the base layer) in whatever permutation came to mind. (See screen shot 2.) The idea is to provoke shape and color changes, allowing myself to work through, as Jeremy Sutton would say when he did his digital painting, the ugly stage of image creation.

9. Something to think about. Nothing grabs me at this point even though either direction can prove satisfactory. Time to log out and do something else.

June 28, 2005 – part 2

10. While I was resting, getting ready for an evening dinner out with friends, I remembered another fascination that I worked with, but hadn’t evolved completely. I was interested in taking photos of people with glasses from the back so that I would see through one of their lens as well as a slice of their face. I grabbed one of these photos and moved it into the received image. My thought was that I could have a person looking towards the eagle’s eye while the eagle was looking towards this person – with the marble in the middle. A story was evolving. The 3D space was a radiating and colorful place behind which the eagle looked into; what if a human was looking into the 3D space in reverse of the eagle – kind of a transpecies contemplation. Well, I look into my dog’s eyes all the time, and I’m sure we’ve all done likewise with cats, birds and other animals. But in and through a 3D space that has a psychedelic quality to it? I thought that I should play out the surreal image that I received and further the story line. This reminded me of the James Elkins’ book, The Object Stares Back. And, of course, the mysterious marble ﬂoats in between the human and eagle staring across this wonderful 3D space. That’s a good start to help crystallize my evolving of the received image.

11. After moving the face into the received image, I used the Transform Tool to make the face smaller and to position it relative to where I thought it might go. I clipped out the eye pieces (upper and lower) and saved the lower portion to reuse at a lower opacity, letting the marble bleed through. When I moved the face over, I realized that I hadn’t cropped the image down and so I had some of the face image still left. I can cut that out when I continue the process. (See screen shot 3.)

12. I still have to work the color relationship of the three pieces to the evolving image—the received image with the eagle’s eye, the 3D space and the marble; the new face with the eye glasses; and the sliced out glass from the glass lens. Perhaps I’ll put in a shadow around the face to add some depth to the dimensionality of the image. Now, off to dinner.

June 29, 2005

13. A new day. I decided to use Free Transform to reshape the face and its location within the new image.

14. I began to attack the side face in a variety of ways. First, I was bothered by the mottled skin and began to move the face from photo-realistic to a painterly style. As a general practice, I use two layers (instead of ‘masks’): revise the bottom layer and then reduce the opacity on the upper layer or erase away parts of the upper image to allow the lower level to blend with it. I often repeat this step with other ﬁlters (such as palette knife, cutout, posterize, dust and scratches – which I used in this image). I also used the Channel Mixer to change the face into black and white and then, when using Curves, reintroduced color as tonal blocks – like duo-tones expanded into each of the segments created, say, by Cutout. I also used the High Pass Filter – way to the extreme – to not only sharpen the edges, but also to intensify blotches of color, especially in the rim of the glasses. (See screen shot 4.)

15. The side face is taking on the kind of density of color, shape, and location that in my mind works with the received image – as an evolution of the collage within my own storyline. Now I need to work with the received image and bring it out with more intensity and brightness. My thought at this point is not to change it other than to give it more pop relative to the side face and glasses.

16. Off to get a cup of coffee and a sweet roll. I returned and decided to work some more on the side face. I added a touch of a dispersed drop shadow to give a hint of depth to the side face. I also copied part of the lower lens area and pasted it on the top part of the lens (which I had failed to do early on – so this is a ﬁx). I adjusted it so that it would ﬁt reasonably into that area and erased away the overlap.

17. I re-energized the received image by using Curves and Selective Color – the ﬂat and somber colors (at least on my monitor) was reinterpreted to be far more intense. Selective color also allows that adding of black in each of the colors selected. This creates a much richer and deeper color. I went back into Selective Color and added more black and reduced the brightness of the white in the bird’s feathers. (See screen shot 5.)

18. Time to start the process of ﬁnishing the image. First, I went over the edge of the side face and glasses with the Smudge Tool. This softened the edge and smooshed the colors along the edge and eliminated some of the obvious over sharpening. I had previously given up on a photo-realistic side face and glasses so the smudging simply added to the painterly effect. It also results in crushing of pixels so that any print with not be pixilated or have jaggies. I decided to add some inner shadow as part of the Effects and erased away the darkening on the lens of the glasses. This added to the differentiating of the face from the underlying image in the collage. (See screen shot 6.) (Oh yes, it is worth mentioning that the image inside the lens had a wooden shutter which remained – after some erasure – that distorts the underlying architecture, which it should, given the effect of the lens.) Touch up the frame of the glasses with the Smudge Tool.

19. Finishing up. After merging the layers, I added a Layer Style, both Bevel and Emboss (with colors found inside the image) and a single pixel Stroke on the inside of the image. The edges of the collaged image needed a bit of tightening or cohesion, especially since there were repeated white spaces (the feathers) alternating with the architectural spokes.

20. I’ll ﬂatten the image and give the image a new title:

The Sighting. I’m bothered by the awkward shape in the lower right hand corner as the face is overlapped by the glasses. Kind of a bump that looks out of place. I went in with the Smudge Tool and made that line more even and then reﬂattened the image and saved it as the ﬁnal (at least for now).

Artist 6

John Holloway

the work without disrupting the integrity and direction of the current state of the image. The pre-existing compositional elements, including the title, clearly delineate the direction of the piece.

Sighting...clearly in the foreground there is an observer and in the extreme background an eye. Between these two elements lies a very central geometric pattern driving the perspective back and to the center of the composition. The focus is on a spherical element playing the part of a compostitional centroid and focus of attention. This is enforced primarily by the dominant geometric grid receding to the relative center.

The imposition of the proﬁle of an observer suggests to me not so much the sighting of a thing as much as the witnessing (sighting) of a creative experience.

Sighting...to see, to observe, to envision and so to visualize.

With this concept in mind I have added the artists hand with digital stylus. This element serves to solidify the foreground proﬁle. We no longer see the proﬁle as that of a static observer but more an active participant in the composition.

For me this is no longer an image of an observer in an environment. Now I see a story of the artist actively visualizing an environment. The “sighting” now is perhaps more of an experience from within the minds eye of the artist.

I took a digital picture of my hand with a stylus in place.

I used the dry brush ﬁlter on this image on one layer. I cut out the

stylus on this layer to allow the image below with no special ﬁlter to show through.

On a lower layer the image is unchanged so that the stylus showing through is in sharper

focus in contrast to the hand and arm.

I hold a Bachelors of Fine Arts (painting major) as well as an Associates in Scientiﬁc Visualization/C++ programming. I have worked for the Research Triangle Institute in the US for ten years as a Graphics Modeling Specialist.

My work is focused on the production of 3D content for VR based runtime training simulations.