Messing about, mixed media and digital manipulation

One of the things I like doing  best as a time waster and ‘a lets not do the housework/ cook dinner exercise ‘ is producing mixed media images and then manipulating them in my iPhone Apps 

My favourite go to doodling is pen and ink flowers 

I am working in a letter journal at the moment and the theme is flowers so I reproduced this image and added colour 

I used Gelatoes , babywipes and teal acrylic through a stencil – the pen ran a bit with the baby wipe 

So I needed to work ontop of it a bit more – I wasn’t really satisfied with this either 

So I edited the warmth and saturation in the iPhone photo app

I reflected the image , tried layering and fiddling with the filters in snapseed – but it wasn’t doing what I wanted 

Until I only layered part of the image and made a stronger tonal panel down the middle 

I rotated and reflected it and then zoomed in on a smaller section to get something I liked a lot more – I like the patterns the lighter sections make in contrast – it’s just a shame the resolution isn’t very good. When you manipulate to this level 

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Messing about with my IPhone Apps

I always wanted to know how to use Photoshop – but I don’t find it easy to use and some of the tools require you to use a lot of numbers. I play on my IPhone and have a great time manipulating and layering images. I thought I would show you an example of what I do. below is a finished piece I made recently. 

This started off with a poster I found on Brick lane in London 

I started off layering it in Image Blender 

You choose 2 images and can add filters and decide which image you want to be the most dominant by moving a slider 

I chose to keep the slider at 50/50 and I used the filter called difference 

Stage 2 – I like mixing images with manipulated versions of themselves – I decided to make a new version of the girl – mixing her with an other image from brick lane 

I added  the two images to Image Blender 

This time I used the mask tool that  allows you to rub out areas of one of the images 

This time I used the filter called ‘plus darker’ and I slid the dot between the images over to the left 

Stage 3 

I opened this image in the Reflection app by ‘Big Blue Chip’ 

This reflects images simply along an axis which you can choose , you save the image and then re open the App and choose the reflected image to get more complicated patterns 

My image reflected once 

My image reflected 3 times 

I decided that there was too much red in the middle so I used the editing tool and cropped the image and reflected it again 

I like to rotate images to get more kaleidoscopic effects. 

Rotated and reflected 

Reflected again 

Stage 3 – I put this image and the image from stage 1 back into Image Blender 

I used the mask tool again to remove parts of the pattern to show the face 

It’s quite a long winded process – but I like it because it’s intuitive and I just need to save and touch the screen to change things