Maybe it’s just all the summer flowers in bloom, but I started making my floral space whimsy pieces again and I’m not inclined to stop. Here’s how the latest one evolved:
I was reviewing some shots looking for things to send to my stock agency and my eye was caught by this shot of “Love in a Mist”, aka Nigella Damascena, which I shot while on a walk in the neighborhood with my kids. There are a couple of big blooms not in focus because of the narrow depth of field, which means even though I like the composition it can’t go to the agency, but it still has potential:
Original "Love in a Mist" photograph
And, probably because I had just done the Dandelion Squadron piece the night before, I thought “Gee, those look like stars”
Step1: Take out all (well, almost all) the greenery:
Doesn’t look like much yet; so now to create a dark space field behind; this isn’t a pure black (which just looks dull in print) but a black-purple-blue swirl with specks of stars courtesy Flaming Pear’s Glitterato plug-in. (In general, I don’t use plug-ins; I haven’t found many that improve my workflow enough to be worth the money; also, I’m generally just a little bit cussed about doing things from scratch in Photoshop. However, Glitterato and LunarCell are so much faster than doing it by hand while being JUST AS GOOD that I think they’ve paid for themselves.). Having the dark background in already makes the flower “stars” sparkle, plus the plant structure I actually left in at very low opacity can now be seen, and adds to the “nebula” feeling. Also, the range of focus on the blooms works here, because it adds to the feeling of depth.
And let’s add some “fairy magic” style stars, ’cause let’s face it, it’s shaping up to be a cute, sweet little piece. (Which probably means a shoggoth will sneak into the final version..)
So it’s almost done; flowers in space, awfully pretty, but there’s nothing *happening*. Clearly what I need here is a spaceship, all shiny and chrome, but how about a nice organic shape — maybe round, with petals? Or space-bumblebee intent on pollination?
Time to go play in Vue again. At least for this I won’t have to fight with the terrain editor….
(10 hours pass, mostly spent outside and elsewhere. These things need to simmer, and too long in front of the computer gives me headaches)
Apparently it really wanted a planet. (Because once you have flowers in space, the rest of physics is also out the window…) I don’t fight the Muse. The shiny metal flower spaceships did get made, they just didn’t look right with the Nigella, and may show up elsewhere, so we have something a little more pulptastic instead.
