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