Scythe and the art

[Scythe]

So well, here I am. I usually don't do this kind of stuff since I'm quite sensitive when it comes to critique. I cannot say wether I'm afraid of critique in general or just of bad critique, but I can say that usually it turned out better for me not to share my stuff, so this is something special, keep that in mind.

I'm a very super slow working person. I can do quite some stuff in a short time but before I would call it "final" I do a thousand little edits

What I do is - how I call it - recycling art. Since not only in music where there is an finite amount of tone combinations that sound good (yes they are very limited!) the same applies to art. And if everyone is trying so hard to make something new, something that hasn't been there, then it might turn out badly.

So I go search for pictures that suit my purpose and cut them together, add filters, effects, redraw what I dislike, change stuff, erase and so on until I'm happy. Still I don't write my name under it, because I feel like I'm doing injustice to the original artists, even after hours of editing (which more often than rarely surpasses the time the original images were created in).

Thats what I did the last two days. The happy version is in the galary. But this one is for many reasons better. If you compare them you also can see those "little edits" I was talking about.

If you want to know which pictures I used in the process and what I did:

The landscape I used. About 7 hours of editing before it was like the above picture.

(I had to entirely remove the sky and replace it with a gradient, add the moon, the light effects, the shadows (especially the drop shadow for Symphony was hard), change the colour of every single colored area, obviously I had to cut out Twilight and fix the background. Plus various areas had to be blurred, the clouds even heavily and yeah... so much I cannot remember everything I did.)

The image I used for Symphony. I think it took 2 hours. It was way less work than the landscape though.

(I had to warp her hair for the wind, add movement blur on the arm and bow, close her eyes, add tears, add moonlight and shadows)

I am sure I could draw it all by myself too, but that's not the way I do stuff. I always take things that are already there and improve them rather than creating something new that I barely can stand looking at because it would be just what I tend to use and then improve. In my mind that would be like going a step backwards *g*

Hope you don't mind me - but before you answer keep in mind what I said at the very top.

Cutiemark I did for my OC:

Due to the white background of the forum I added a stroke (the black line around the moon) and that messed up a little, but ya get the idea.

[Scythe]

Today I learned: How to abuse brushes, effects and other fancy stuff in Photoshop to a non-funny extend.

All this happened to me today because of this little image:

It was never meant to be, it just "happened" and I couldn't stop messing around with Photoshop then.