This post is the second part of my six-month experiment with becoming artsy. I have already told you about the doodling/analog stage, so this is about the digital stage. The mosaic picture above is one of the first attempts at digital art.

It started out pretty much the same as an analog pictures, in that I traced the basic outline from a photograph I had taken years before. But, this time it was done by manipulating layers in a digital app. The picture was put on the bottom layer and the penned outline was made with an iPad and digital pen on a second layer. When that was done, the photo layer was hidden, and all that was visible was the outline sketch. There was no tracing paper, ink, or marking pens involved.

I then, via my iPad I digitally sketched in the details I wanted, such as the veins in the leaves, and the imperfection in the sunflower head. This was all done on a third layer. Then it was time to choose the colors I wanted to use. If you saw the post about the analog experiments (if you didn’t then click HERE) you saw the 100+ pens I accumulated to try to find the “right” color to use. In this digital experiment, it was as if I had a million pens to choose from. All I had to do was to decide on the color I wanted and then just click the leaf or other object in the picture I wanted to color, and it immediately painted that area. If the color was not quite right, then I simply picked another color, and it replaced the “not quite” color with a click on my iMac. For the picture above I got artsy and chose a half-dozen different shades of green for the leaves.

Pretty much the same thing was done for the rest of the mosaic picture. The end-result was then stored away in a digital file for printing to paper or transferring to things like the picture in this post.

I admit that my techie side gave me an advantage as I had been working on graphic design for at least a couple of years before the above image was made.

That’s enough for this post. The next post in this analog vs digital story will present you with a second very different approach to digital artsy. I will also clue you in on the particular apps I have chosen for future Artsy pictures here on RJsMosaics.