Art from Photographs

I noticed a theme recently of art created from photographs so I thought I'd share some of it.

I took some self-portraits while I was bald; this being one of them:

I found a YouTube channel, davrodigital, of tutorials about photo effects made in Photoshop Elements. I've tried to follow a few of them, with mixed results. Here's a framing effect:

I like this frame a little more:

The picture wasn't perfectly suited to frames because there wasn't enough margin at the top (above my head).

Then I tried a "sketch" effect:

Even following each step, it doesn't come out with the same results as the tutorial, so I'm guessing what kind of photograph you start with makes a big difference. (Like does it have a lot of contrast, or a lot of lines, or whatever.) Or maybe he's not sharing all the secrets to finding the right settings.

Here's a picture I took when I was in Toronto.

Not that great at all.

But it worked pretty well for the "tiny planet" effect:

Fun, right?

This was another portrait I took in the same session:

And look what my friend drew and gave to me to celebrate being done with treatments:

Isn't it fantastic?

I was really touched by the gift.

Finally, my sister commissioned our cousin, artist Karen Rhebregen, to make a portrait of our grandparents in batik.

She created the composition from a couple pictures my sister sent her.

It's wonderful! It was a gift for my mother and proudly hangs in her home.

Alleluia!

Our church organized another group project for Easter. Each year during lent we "put away" the word "alleluia" and don't use it at all. Then on Easter we "bring it back."

Last year we each decorated letters of the word Alleluia and hung them during the service all around the sanctuary. This year we were asked to make the entire word, with whatever method we wanted and they will hang at the front of the sanctuary.

I decided to use the method I had thought about using for the last church group project: colourized pictures from our church directory. And this is what I got:

Actual size is 11x4"

I was very happy to figure out how to do this in Photoshop and am really happy with the result. I used to update the church directory so I had a bunch of old pictures on my computer. There are about 90 of them in the project (including the duplicates).

Here are the Alleluias done by others:

I always enjoy working on these group projects. I love the variety of interpretations and methods.