Cartoon Filter

This is the last picture that I used the cartoon filter on. Once again I took this photo while on my trip in Europe. I chose this filter because it just adds so much character to this old, enormous bulding. I think it gives it a bit of a gothic feel to it. Unfortunately I can not tell you where this picture was taken exactly, other than the fact that it was taken in Hungary. There were too many exquisit buildings to keep track of.

Creepy Vicky!

Yes, this is me. This was quite a fun project. First I had to cut everything out of the picture, by slowly tracing the contours of my face. Then the fun part comes along! You get to mess with all the different filters like: blur, distort, you can add funky colors, as i did, or simply take away all color.

Miskolc - Diosgyor Castle

This photo was taken in Miskolc, Hungary, with my dance group and a beautiful historic castle. Again I used the cartoon filter. I think it really makes it look comical, and look at all the dpeth there is in the clouds.

Lazy Boy

My piece of Abstract art is titled Lazy Boy, because that’s what I am reminded of when I see this sort of relaxed seal like creature. As you may know Lazy Boy is a luxurious chair brand, well-known for selling that irresistibly, comfortable chairs. So comfortable you could become really lazy in it. So, in my picture, that’s exactly what I see, a lazy boy (or seal), of who in a way looks like the chair itself. The tools I used to create my abstract art was first the “free select” tool to create my outline, which I set it on “feathered edges” to give the drawing that blending-in sensation. And then I used the “paint bucket” to fill in my outline with colors. I chose to use analogous colors, the red-orange-yellow branch of colors, with blue as my highlight because a chair should be cozy and warm (hint, hint), so I chose warm colors and blue as my night sky. What inspired this piece of art was a song by Fiest called “Sea lion.” As you can guess it’s about a seal and the song itself is very strange, so I wanted to create a picture that could lead to many explanations. I want my audience to question the emotions of this seal, is it happy? Is it tired, sleepy, lazy, laughing? Those are all correct. I myself find it rather funny looking, it kind of looks like Jell-O, the way it’s so relaxed and sprawled across the art work.

Marmoset Monkey

I took this adorable picture of a Marmoset monkey at the local zoo in Hungary over the summer of 2008, and believe me they were not camera shy. Again I found myself playing with different filters, and the one I especially like was, ofcourse, the cartoon filter. What I like about this feature on ths photo is how your eyes are now instantly drawn to the white clown hair.

When I see this picture I always associate these colors with Easter. They are bright, happy colors. I created this picture in one of my workshops through gimp. I began messing with different paint bruches. I had lots of fun embracing my creative side.

Verona, Italy

This is a picture I took half a year ago in Verona, Italy. It’s a picture of your typical buildings all across Europe. All the houses are squished together and flourished in fun bright, and often, complementary colors. I chose this picture originally just thinking “Italy, home of the art.” It would be a gorgeous building to recreate on the computer. Turns out it was, but it took so much detail and time to draw in every little balcony railing. I mostly used the square brushes, or at least tried to. It was so small it was sometimes hard to tell if it was circular or not. First thing I did was crop the picture because I wanted the focus to be more on the building and not the pavement. What was most challenging when filling in the color was the roof tops and the blue sky, because neither were one color. So after I played around with the mode and opacity for a while, I finally decided to, for example with the roofs, I first chose one color to fill in the roof top, then I chose a more dominant color, set the opacity to 98 and the mode to dissolve, and then refilled over the original color, giving you a multicolored roof top. I really wanted to capture the essence of the housing style in Europe. There is a very different feel when walking down a street surrounded by a block of apartment buildings and walking down a street in Europe next to a tiny little café and stone archway’s. I wanted my observer to feel a warm sense of welcome into the picture; to want to be a part of the colorful people enjoying the blue sky.

Verona, Italy

This is my original picture.

A Glass In Shadow

I originally chose to work with this photo because of the contrast of colors in the glass and the midnight black back round that makes up the wall. And just by staring at the picture for a moment I realized my favorite part to this window is the circle glass. As I read earlier circles tend to be portrayed as friendly and perfect looking shapes. And so with the contrast of the back round, I did not feel it necessary to crop the circle dead center. The colors alone draw your attention to its perfect shape and honestly I don't believe in perfection, because perfection to me, might not be the same to you. That’s what I believe is one of the many beautiful aspects of art, is that opinions are free to make judgment because there is no right or wrongly done piece of art. So I wanted to make the circle slightly off the center. After cropping the photo, I realized how lovely the black wall is, casting a perfectly circular shadow over the rim of the glass, just as the earth casts a shadow over the moon, during a lunar eclipse. Sorry for sending it so many times, I was really confused.

Hoaxy Ghosty

A shocking story, three teenagers went missing five months ago, on July 30th, in the town of Whethersbuck, where it is told that the nearby forest is haunted by ghosts and other mysterious creatures. The three teenagers, by the names of Nathaniel Zester, Jacob Zester, and Phillip Holcomb, were on there way back from a field trip, with there school, Podas High School, and were simply stopping in this tiny town, in Connecticut, to grab a quick lunch. Detectives believe that the three teenagers had decided to go wandering into the forest and got lost by nightfall. After weeks of endless search parties, all that was found was a camera, which is believed to have been owned by the youngest of the group Nathaniel Zester. And more recent news on the case tells us that detectives have developed the pictures that were taken on that camera, and found some quite disturbing pictures. Take a look… (picture). Oddly enough nearly all of the photos were blurred out and some were just too disturbing to post. But of those pictures that did come out, all the people in them came out in negatives. And as for those three kids, that was the last anyone ever heard of them. The teenagers were not found nor was there any trace of them, except for that camera. I will say this, though, those two little girls in that picture were not of the three that went missing. But mysteriously enough, as I checked the records of people gone missing in that forest, I found out that fifty years ago, two little girls by the names of Sarah Walker who was seven and Camilla Walker who was four also went missing into that forest and, like the three teenagers, vanished without a single trace and were never seen or heard from ever again.


Well in truth, I had a difficult time thinking up an idea for a hoax, but I eventually decided on the traditional creepy ghost, which I found a lot harder to do then I imagined. But before I decided that I actually first found the picture of the two girls and started messing with their picture. It was difficult getting my ghost just right. First I tried using the motion blur, but then I thought she should be transparent , but then that looked weird with both blur and transparency, so I eventually started messing with decomposing the picture and ended up with a blurry, decomposed picture of two girls. After I got this picture just right, I then realized what I was aiming for, and then the story just came together as I found the picture of the graveyard.

Esztergom Basilica

While learning to use the gimp program I really fell in love with the cartoon filter. When you aplly that filter to a picture it dramatizes the shadows and shows great contrast in light and dark colors. This is a photo I took in Hungary of the Esztergom Basilica. It is the largest church built in Hungary and began its construction in 1832 and completed in 1869.