Creative Photoshop; Drawing with Digital Collage

'Miss Petals' Dreamscape Impressions 2019

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​"My eyes adjust to the light surrounding me, everything is ethereal, clear yellow-gold. It feels like there are spikes of tall grasses made of yellow sunlight, or grasses bathed in golden light. Off to my left there is an opaque black darkness providing a high contrast and sense of a hillside. The petaled water creature, with a rainbow of pink and greens on its petals swims beside me through the golden grasses, swimming through the air like it’s water."

I scanned my hand-drawn sketch (left) into my computer yesterday and spent the afternoon creating collages, using layered duplicates and coloured screens. In this post I'll explain my use of 'creative photoshop' but first, here's a bit of background on where the image comes from:

from my dream journal:

One seed sprouts and blooms, becomes a petaled-creature like a mermaid made of flowers.  She swims out into the void, her petals rippling like seaweed.

This image, was created by layering two copies of the image over top of one another and applying an 'Exclusion' filter to one. This ensured that both were visible, and the overlapped areas became a reverse image (whites became black, blacks became white).

My 11yr old son, looking over my shoulder was the first to spot that a circle could be created by repeating the image four times. The images below show this effect.

I was able to rotate the image to explore different compositions and the black circle in the centre is actually an additional four repeated again with the colours reversed.

'Inner Visions: Miss Petals' Pink & Green 2019, 'Impressions of a Dreamscape' Digital Collage, 38cm x 38cm

'Inner Visions: Miss Petals' Black & White 2019, 'Impressions of a Dreamscape' Digital Collage, 38cm x 38cm

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what is creative photoshop?

In popular culture, photoshop has become famous image manipulation software known for fake news and doctored images that perpetuate false models of beauty. What started off as removing blemishes has become an industry in changing the physical structure of photographed bodies. So when I wanted to give a nod to the software I used to create some of my images I found I wanted to distinguish between fakery and original artwork. The #creativephotoshop hashtag seemed to provide that distinction.

Creative photoshop is the use of image manipulation software to create new images. Graphic design students learn photoshop, because it enables us to work with photographs to isolate details, emphasise details, and create new new compositions. A very simple Photoshops Basics course at collage in 2001 or 2002 was the extent of my training for using this powerful tool.

I learned how to use layers (like multiple pages layered on top of each other), how to select and isolate things on the page, and how to 'blend' images. Like filters these change the appearance of the image but more importantly that blend layers (pages) together. (The first and last black&white images above are good examples of this, both use the 'Exclusion' Blend).

Want to try it yourself?

VideoBlender is free on the app store (more about that in a minute) - that would be a good place to start to get familiar with the blending options.

For more control, if you have Photoshop, I'm sure you could find some online tutorials to help you get familiar with the basics.

the process:

When I say I collaborate with my software, I'm not kidding. Both Photoshop on my computer and the VideoBlender App that I use to layer videos together on my phone both use the same Blend options (Screen, Lighter, Darker, Exclusion, Difference, etc). And when I put an image combination together there is no way of knowing quite how the colours and composition will interact, and so through a process of trial and error, I uncover a series of surprises and am led by the capacity and limitations of the software as it suggests directions to me by presenting different results in response to my selections. This is most evident in the manipulation of still images. Using the images above as an example, here is a breakdown of the process.

​1. I scanned the drawing into my computer and opened it in Photoshop. By copying the image I was able to create an extra page and experiment with how to overlay and arrange the two copies.

2. In the process of creating the circling quartets (above) I created multiple pages and duplicates (to enable reverting to previous versions if necessary). As a result, I stumbled across what would happen if eight petaled creatures were visible at the same time (Inner Visions: black and white, above)

3. The pink and green version is the most complex. I discovered a compatible shade of green by applying a filter to the pink sheet of colour. This transferred the pink to the drawing underneath and made everything that was white underneath a deep dark green.

4. Additional blocks of colour were inserted onto new layers, 'Hue' blend was applied to the green layer to transfer the colour to the drawing outside the cut-out circle.

5. Meanwhile, 'Screen' blend was applied to the drawing so that it absorbed the colour of the pink layer underneath it.   

6. The border was created by enlarging the 'canvas size' and colouring the background green.

7. To create a transparency, I added a second border on the top layer in my stack. It functioned like an image mount before framing until I altered its transparency so the drawing shone through.