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Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man

Well, this is meta, I thought when the scan finished: a photo of Earl taking a photo. Whether Mom or Dad took the shot, I admire the composition and the sense of motion from the windswept grass. Never afraid to mess with a good thing, I thought it would be fun to play with some of Photoshop's various filters and adjustment tools to see how the image might look as a faux painting:
Rather than just slap the watercolour filter on the whole image and call it a day, I tried for a little more sophistication this time around, selecting the sky and water and applying the hue/saturation sliders and different photo filters to bring out the blues - as if I were one of those artists who had a "blue" period. And make no mistake, that reference is the beginning and end of my knowledge on the subject; that is, I'm aware that certain artists had "blue" periods, and I imagine that these blue periods involved sadness or melancholy and the colour blue, but really I'm just guessing. I really regret that all the classical studies and art appreciation sections at the University of Alberta were already full when I was picking my courses. They sure would have come in handy.

Despite my ham-handed ignorance of art, I'm reasonably happy with this result, even though I'm fully aware Photoshop  and Mom or Dad did most of the work. What's most important to me is to stretch my boundaries and experiment in fields where I'm uncomfortable, which is why readers have been seeing more and more little projects like this on the blog and fewer essays.

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