Variations on a Theme

So sometimes you do just a good enough job on something that all you want to do is screw around with it, and everything you do while screwing around still looks cool, in it's own way. Thats how I know I've made something good, when no matter how you mess with it, it still looks neat, and it becomes hard to choose what the best variation actually is.

I recently experienced this while attempting to work on another "Skype doodle".

The original photo:

I drew over it in my usual thick lined way, and gave it the graphic look, but I kind of messed up the linework and I then realized I didn't have a clever word caption for the photo, so I decided to try a new style and take what I had and convert it into a "Painterly" look. More of a digital painting then vector art.

I sat back and thought "Okay, this looks pretty groovy, I could stop here". But I was simultaneously happy with the result and not happy with the result. The colors looked a little flat and I kinda wanted to see how it would look if I screwed around with filters and blending modes. So I did. Here a a few of the better variations:

Having fun now, I decided to full blown steal some Andy Warhol thunder and just screw around with the basic colors.

Animated colors! (click on it to see the .gif in action)

 So after an initial failure, I turned it into a varied success with lots of interesting options to look at. Just shows the many different directions you can get from one image, and I barely scratched the surface.

Art Dump 4.0

Still livin, still doing stupid things in photoshop every night

Random assortment of pictures done in recent days:

How Brett Favre's career should have ended

More Melon & Posts!

This one was as dumb as I could make it

And a few more Skype picture funnies

And lastly, I was asked to touch up a Christmas card but I just went insane instead

Inspiration from strange places

Sometimes you get weird ideas out of nowhere. For the past few days I've been looking through screencaps I've taken of my girlfriend over Skype, and some of them speak to me. So I have been bringing them into photoshop and whipping up really fast and stupid graphic doodles based on whatever idea the picture gave me. They also give me an excuse to have fun with words and design elements, which i like doing but admittedly could use more practice on

Not all the pictures i have are flattering

Most take about 15 minutes tops, though the guitar one took about an hour and is much higher res. It's a fun little quick fix later at night when most motivation has gone out the window.