art stories – The Art of Shelli Fitzpatrick

The story of my artwork

I don’t make moments, I make them better.

A pack of white wolves stand guard over the overgrown ruins of a castle. Art print by artist Shelli Fitzpatrick. — The castle guard is an artwork by Shelli Fitzpatrick and prints are available at shellifitzpatick.com

That may sound like an arrogant statement and I really don’t mean it that way, so please bear with me while I explain.

One of the characteristics of my work is that I very often create scenes that never actually happened in reality. Because I specialize in photo manipulation, I often take scenes from more than one image and meld them together to create something that only ever existed in my imagination and now in a particular artwork such as this one titled “The castle guard”.

Yes the castle was real and so were the wolves but they were never really in this same setting that I created in this image. And I don’t mean to sound arrogant at all when I tell you that I much prefer the scene I created to the photos of reality that I used to create this work from. So please forgive me if that is how I come off to you.

What I do is scour sites that offer free to use images with a CC0 license or that are definitely public domain trying to find art worthy images to use to create one of my works with. Then I take these images into my software, cut out what I need and put the parts together into the scene I have imagined. I then apply extra editing to add an artistic touch such as impressionist style or watercolor or whatever effect I am looking for.

My go to software is not AI as some of you might think, but rather I mainly use GIMP and Art Rage. Occasionally I will use Watercolor Studio or Ink Scape and even more rarely I use Krita.

This kind of work is not the only kind I create. There are times when I use my own photographs as content or I just free hand create minimalist paintings, but that is a subject for another post.

I am very grateful to the photographers who donate their images to CC0 licensing sites like Pixabay and to the art museums that have released so many works to open access collections so that artists like me are able to source great images to use when making artwork without worrying about copyright issues.

I do try to donate to the original photographer or museums when it is possible for me and especially if an artwork that I used their content to create has sold. But I do it anonymously for obvious reasons.

I hope you have enjoyed this behind the scenes look into my creative processes and if you love this artwork or would like to see more of my work, please visit my official artist website at www.shellifitzpatrick.com

On Beating the Art Blahs

At the moment winter is setting in where I live. The leaves are drying up and blowing away, the garden is frozen and dead. It is cold inside and out and inspiration seems to have gone with the leaves. As I sit here bundled up in front of my blank computer screen trying to drum up some inspiration to create more artwork, all I can think about is how cold my toes are and how blank my mind is.

So where do we find inspiration on the bleak blah days like this? Sometimes I like to visit online art museums and libraries to look for old vintage art. That never fails to get my creative juices flowing.

Also, and I hope it won’t sound crazy, but sometimes I just go back over my own artwork because most of the time when I am creating a piece of artwork, I have more than one idea going on in my head. Since I can only follow one path at a time, when I go back and revist some of my older work it jogs my memory of the path not taken and I can sometimes explore that avenue as well.

Examples of this kind of thing can be seen in my portfolio where there is more than one style of art made with the same image. Below is an example of two different styles of art I created using one of my floral photographs as a starting point. I hope this post helps you find new ways of getting inspired when you are feeling empty and blank by reviewing your own artwork and revamping it into totally new pieces of art that might reach a new audience you wouldn’t have appealed to before.

Wild Wildflowers Colorful Botanical Art by Shelli Fitzpatrick — Get prints of this art here

Comicbook Wildflowers Botanical Art by Shelli Fitzpatrick — Get prints of this art here

A passion for the past

I am a lover of history and nostalgia and much of my work reflects that love. This is a piece I created of a village that has a definite historic flavor and I tried to make it feel like an impressionist style even though my tools are entirely digital. I am always striving to make digital art that doesn’t look digital.
I’ve included the description I wrote to go with this image on the day I posted it to my website because I was feeling the role of a storyteller that day and I hope you enjoy reading it.

It goes like this…

“An impressionist style view of a medieval village as seen from a hill overlooking the town center. There is a tall spire on the cathedral dominating the other smaller houses and buildings with their charming red rooftops. The community sprawls out over the rolling green fields and hills to a range of mountains in the distance.

In your imagination zoom into the center of the bustling main street and hear the sounds of hawkers trying to lure you to buy their goods and carriage wheels clattering on the cobblestone pavement. Smell the aromas of flowers and street vendors cooking meat on spits and bread baking and fresh horse manure from the horse drawn buggies and coaches.

Feel the excitement of a day at the town market in the late afternoon as things wind up for the last of daylight, everyone preparing to close up shop and go home. A quick look at the cloudy sky seems to warn of coming showers. Time to find a bed for the night…”