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Does fooling around with KPT count as an idea?? (Again!)
Kai's Power Tools 2, Kai's Power Tools 3, Photoshop 4, Fractal Design Painter 5
After pining, and gnawing, and slavering, and gnashing and wailing; and finding out that EVERYBODY has KPT2 on their KPT3 cd except me.... I have been rescued! Thank goodness for old junk on eBay ;) To celebrate, I decided to make another really cool fractal dragon. This is... um, it. With a the shuffle thingy set to shuffle the outside colours 'til I found some nice ones. And then I zoomed in and got some new colours and did a lighten mixture on the deal.
It looked cool, but.... needed some spheres. And more spheres. Then I copied everything, pasted to a new layer, and did a lighting effect on it. This time, I used the RGB lights, shining from 3 different directions with mondo high Green for the bump ridges. I merged that with the original to get a... kinda funky shadowy images on the edges, some fierce ridges near the middle, and some cool glossy glows near the bottom. Um... in lighten mode, I think.
Okay, sure, that's cool, but got a focal area? (How
about a whirlpool in the lower right space? Naah, too hard.) That
big blue sphere right in the middle is just too plain. Lasso'd an arm
of the fractal, copied, pasted, wrestled it over there, and put a punch on
it. Airbrush-erased around the edges. (It kinda looks like a
face in profile...) Then that green one near it was too blah, also.
What to stick on it? Something with wings. Well, I found
something, can you see what it is? (Try
"Did You See That Butterfly...?")
Still, something was missing. The spheres needed some teeny tiny
butterflies flying around 'em. So, off to FDP.
Shrank the butterfly nozzle waaaaaay down and sprayed
some on. Tried some impasto effect, but it didn't seem to take. Been
a long time, gotta read the instructions again...!
Back in 'Shop... Again looking for an old piece of art or background to stick in the corner. Found some swirly blue watery stuff... twirled it a bit, laid some lighting on it for some shinyness and dimension... Then magic-wanded the empty area in the lower right. Feathered, and messed with the mask by painting on it. Airbrushing out some edges around the fractal branches, and covering up those tiny spheres. Then Paste Into. A little layer adjusting, stretching, rotating, etc, and it looks nice.
Now what for the other corner? Again a magic wand selection, feathered and doctored up. I wanted to extrude it, but 'Shop wouldn't let me :( So instead, I did the tile thing. Blah, kinda flat with pink between. So I selected the tile pieces and pasted in... actually, the whirlpool again! Difference Clouded it up, inverted the colour, did a little Difference compositing, and airbrush-erased the edges, lightened up... hey, terribly subtle, ain't it?
Now what the heck to call it? "Music of the Spheres"
sounded good. Picked an elegant script kinda font... made it in white,
that was boring. So I grabbed a chunk of the image that had some neat
colours and pasted it over the text. I was gonna merge them in a colorizing
mode, but it didn't work, so instead, I loaded the text's layer opacity mask
and chopped the colour into the letter shapes. Messed with the colours.
Messed with the modes. (Ever try to paint something while on
a Difference layer? Colours come out weird!)
Then it was too hard. So I duplicated the text
and Gaussian blurred it a couple times, to make a nice glow. Too bad
that makes it soooooo transparent. So what the hey, I duplicated that
layer to make it twice as opaque!
Slapped on a signature in the bottom, stretched it around
to sorta go into the picture. Eh, well, it's there.
Oh, and why the big black patch on the page... Well, this was designed really to go on a black background, but then my horizontal rules and page tabs don't look right ;) So.... stuck it in a big black table. Take a look at the pic again and see if you can figure out why it's supposed to be on a black background...... Okay, you dragged it outta me. The pic is supposed to be subtly un-rectangular, so it appears to recede a bit in space. The black matte that is actually on the pic isn't wide enough to 'hide' the wrong angles. :)
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