A guest post by David Hayes
While I consider myself both a photographer and a mixed-media artist, lately all I have been focused on is my photography. Feeling it was time to return to my mixed-media roots I decided to see what I could do if I mixed my photography with my collages. Sure Shot is a result of one such endeavour. I used the apps iColorama, Repix, and Stackables as well as a collage from my cut and paste “play book.”
I have a journaling notebook where I play around with different things, layer upon layer, just like you do. I took one of these pages, scanned it into my iPad, and did some quick cropping and exposure/contrast touching up. Then I pulled it into the app iColorama to use one of its brushes.
Opening up “Brush” (A) I elected to use a brush from the “Explode” (B) category. Picking “1/8” and making sure my brush color was white and blending set at Normal, I started to dance around the image placing this brush along the left side of the image.
I then switch the brush color to black and repeated my “dance” over the white brush marks. If you look close you can see how this nicely layered, much like using a paintbrush on a mixed-media collage!
I could have stayed in iColorama and used its wide variety of brushes and effects but there was one in the app Repix that I knew I had to use on this piece. So I saved my work to Camera Roll and opened the image in Repix. From the app’s Brushes, I went for “Drips.”
Here’s a close up of “Drips.” I used this on the right side of the image, acting as a nice balance to the other brush marks on the left side.
With all my “paint marks” in place, I saved this version and reopened it in Stackables where I planned to add the final layers.
My first layer was “Red Dwarf” with the blend mode “Hard Light.”
The second layer is “Transfer” and a blend mode of “Normal.”
The final layer was a correction/adjustment layer. I used “Color Adjust” and “Saturation” to give the colors in the image a bit of a pop. Again I used “Normal” as my blend mode. That finished it up!
Here’s the final version, Sure Shot. I hope you like it as much as I do. I know I will be doing more of these mixed-media pieces as it lets me work with both my photography and get my hands messy cut and pasting. Who could ask for anything more!!
David Hayes is a photographer, mixed-media artist, painter and explorer of life. Visit his blog at clearerreflections.com.
For more photography inspiration and instruction, check out the latest book by Susan Tuttle: Art of Everyday Photography.
