Here’s an interesting article from NPR that says “A new study finds that enjoyment of arts and culture slows down biological aging.” You can read the article here. The article states that you can slow down your biological aging by not only doing art, but also by going to concerts, museums or art galleries.

That reminds me that I haven’t done any digital art in a month of Sundays, so I’d better get going again. I’ll tell you my plans in a future post. I haven’t give up on creating digital art at all, I’ve just gotten too busy doing other things. For me, creating art is like doing meditation, another activity I haven’t been doing lately. So, look for a near-future post about about my creation efforts. More later.

Here’s a new piece of digital art, just a whimsical piece, a small one more like a finger exercise. I haven’t really decided on a title, yet. I’m pondering whether to call it “Purgatory” or “Life Goes On.” I didn’t use any AI, like Midjourney or such, just some content from one of my digital art courses.

I did a quick finger exercise called “Lady on a Balcony.” This didn’t take too long to create and it probably took longer to find the elements hidden away in my stash. The balcony is a photo that I took in Meknes, Morocco many years ago and all the other elements are content from a few of my digital art courses. Enjoy.

It’s been quite awhile since my last digital art post, so here’s a new one. I’m calling it “Fish Tale,” though it could also be titled “The One That Got Away.” It’s a whimsical piece that didn’t take all that long to put together over the last three days when I could make time for it. As always, compositions are a lot of fun to work on; otherwise, why do them?

For each new piece I create and post on here, I’m going to give a rundown of what I did to create it. First of all there are six images in the composition. The main image and the sailboat are from a couple of photos I took in the Dominican Republic way back in 2006-2008, and the five fish and whale images were generated in Midjourney. There are about 20 layers in the work, so there wasn’t a lot involved; it’s almost like a finger exercise. Other than the image layers, there were adjustment layers for saturation, blurring, exposure and for the speech bubble. There are also a couple of texture layers from the various art courses I’m a member of. I put the whole thing together, merged the layers and ran the final piece through Topaz Labs 2 to create the Artistic Impression look.

I’m going to call this one finished for now, but I might tweak it a bit and perhaps run it through Photoshop again with a cartoon template or action that I have laying around somewhere. It is best viewed at a large scale; just click on it a few times. So, it was fun making this and I hope to create some more elaborate pieces in the very near future. I’ll put them here, of course.

The only digital painting I’ve done has been in Photoshop and, for various reasons, I found it rather clunky, but usable. However, as a Black Friday deal, the folks at Escape Motions put their award-winning digital painting software, Rebelle, on sale as a pre-purchase for $29.99 for the Pro version. (Standard version is $19.99) This is a great deal because the normal price is $149.99, so I went ahead and got the Pro version, which will be released on December 14th.

I’m stoked because I downloaded the trial version of Rebelle 6 and I’ve been playing around with it. I’ve barely scratched the surface, but it’s awesome. The budding painter in me can paint with ink, pencil, pastels, water colors, gouache, and many more on various types of canvas, including cotton, gesso, wood veneer, and Washi, among others. I can foresee that my free time is going to be taken up by learning to use this amazing product.

From the Escape Motions website:

Rebelle is the award-winning, hyper-realistic painting software with phenomenal oils, acrylics, watercolors, and other wet and dry media. Paint pigments color mixing, oil thickness, watercolor diffusion, and NanoPixel technology, convincingly mimic the way natural media interact with the canvas and itself.

If you hurry, you can get the pre-purchase deal now, but it ends on November 30th.

One of the suggestions that Sebastian Michaels makes on one of his Photo Artistry courses is that students take some time first thing in the morning, before reading any email or browsing websites,  to let your subconscious mind help you to write out a list of 10 nouns or phrases that pop into your head and write them down, one after another. What does that first noun lead to, the first word that pops into your head, then the second and so on. Don’t stop to think about what the next word might be, just free-wheel it, don’t analyze. Let your subconscious mind take over. After finishing your list, choose one of the items on the list that strikes you as being a good idea for a composition. Write down what the composition might entail and what elements you might need to include in the composition: photos, textures, etc.

When I first started the course, I did this almost every morning, but I haven’t been doing it lately. I recently thought that I should get back into this habit, so I did a list this morning. Here it is:

The items are in the order that they popped into my head: weather, symbols, tomb, sarcophagus, desert, statue, protection, lost and found, relic and shoe. Don’t ask me the whys or wherefores of these items–my brain just spewed them out.

The phrase that I picked that might make a good composition is “lost and found.”

How about a piece showing a lost and found office or booth with interesting, unusual, amazing items scattered around? That might be fun to create.

So, that’s a morning list and how it’s supposed to spark some creative ideas.

Here’s another one:

ticket, cashier, vault, money, coins, jail, time, clocks, pocket, hand

My composition idea word is clocks. How about a composition with lots of clocks signifying the passage of time and our inevitable passing on? Someone trying to push back the hands or to stop them. Symbols of time passing: planets in orbit around the sun, old age, tombstone or graveyard.

I might create another page where I add my morning lists. Stay tuned.

Just did a quick finger exercise, a warm up, called Boats. I extracted a couple of boats from some of my old Dominican Republic photos, threw on a few textures, added some Color Lookups and played around with the blend modes and opacities. I might decide to try turning this into a full-fledged composition a bit later. For an explanation of what a finger exercise is, read this post.

I hadn’t been creating any digital art lately because Photoshop and Lightroom had become almost impossibly sluggish. I wasn’t sure what was wrong and after trying various solutions, I decided to reinstall Windows 11. It took me most of a day to get everything back to the way I wanted, but, voila, the fresh install (it was a reset, actually) was the solution. Both PS and LR now run very smoothly.

If you’re reading this now, you’ve probably missed out on the newest Photoshop Virtual Summit (PSVS), #5. The Summit takes place once or twice every year over the course of five days, and it’s comprised of various Photoshop tutorials and videos, including all the new features in Photoshop. In the past there have also been Lightroom Summits and a Creative Summit. Some of the experts who are presenters include Colin Smith, Khara Plicanic, Lisa Carney, Matt Kloskowski, and many more, including my favorite, my mentor in the various Photo Artistry courses I take, Sebastian Michaels.

Some of the topics that are being covered this year are “Artistic Photoshop Compositing with AI-Generated Content” with Sebastian, “Design Like a Pro: Unleash the Full Potential of Photoshop’s Tools” with Theresa Jackson, “Bridge Doesn’t Suck!” with Matt Kloskowski, “Using Generative Fill for Compositing” with Colin Smith and about 40 more. You can view the entire class schedule here.

There is no charge for the Summit if you join in on time because it’s free to watch live and up to two days after the individual presentations began. However, if, like me, you don’t have the time, you can purchase a VIP pass, which gives you lifetime access to all the presentations, plus class notes and some extra bonus videos and other goodies. It’s $99 ($89 if you’re a former VIP pass holder) and it’s very much worth it. Give the Summit a try, but if you’re too late for this one, I’m sure the next one will probably be in March or April next year. Enjoy!