New Found Inspiration

While browsing for new ideas and techniques, I stumbled upon a digital artist by the name of Vitaly S. Alexius. (http://www.svitart.com/)

Alexius does a lot of photo manipulation using themes and ideas that are very similar to those that I would like to work with (Urban, grunge). He then continues to further develop his pieces by digitally "painting" over them. This produces some interesting results.

I myself own a Wacom pen tablet, and I would love to experiment with this technique more. Although my digital painting skills are far from great, I'd still like to give it a shot. After comparing images with just straight photo manipulation with photo manipulations that were then further developed using this "painting" technique, the "painted" ones were far more interesting.

Here are some of Alexius' works to show you what I mean.

Absence of Vision by =alexiuss on deviantART


Aeons of Eclipse by =alexiuss on deviantART

Pretty cool, eh?

First post of the semester!

Well this looks like a good time to make my first post, and to describe what my (tentative) plans are for this semester.

I am very interested in photo manipulation. More specifically, taking various scenes that have nothing to do with each other and combining parts of each scene to make a whole new, more interesting -- yet artistic-- scene.

I'm at the point right now where I'm brainstorming some concepts and doing research on different techniques. Throughout this process I'm trying to keep in mind what kind of photos I could take to give me a good base to start on when I'm all set on a concept. I plan on making a series of works (I am not sure about how many in the series yet), all with a common theme. However, I am really drawn to urban and technology-based themes.

So far I think I have a good idea of what I want to do, now it just comes down to getting things done. So this is where I'm at.