Hummingbird Kaleidoscopish Mandala

When I make art, I almost always only use images, photos and drawings taken or made entirely by me. But there are of course few exceptions. Like the bodyswap images that are originally ripped out of magazines, glued to paper, scanned and remade in Photoshop. Or photographs that I've taken of art made by someone else and created new art from that. It's impossible of course to make everything yourself if you are like me, someone who likes to take photos outside. At this point of my life I have not yet built a single escalator or a boat, but I hope it's obvious to everyone. And then there's also the thing that if the things that I've photographed, were copyrighted, me taking the photo certain way, including surroundings and remaking that photo entirely again in Photoshop, would make it original enough so that the copyright wouldn't apply anymore.

With clip art, images and photos copied from the internet you need to be extra careful because when you just copy the photo, you have not yet added anything original to it. You can derive your own art from it but you have to know which ones and almost always you should mention the artist behind the original art. Or at least mention which part isn't made by you. I'm not going to tackle that subject again as I already did write about copyright, fair use and exceptions about a year ago, but the advises are still valid. The point in that post is that you should always be honest about your art and give credit.

@juliakponsford wrote an excellent post about transparency in art about five days ago. The point in that post is that you should always be honest about your methods. An excellent post and there's still time to go and give a big upvote to the it!

I couldn't agree more with @juliakponsford. I do not think less of creating art with different methods, it's just that people really should be honest about how they created the art.

As I already said, I usually don't make art derived from images made by other people. But I should! I should use CC0 clip art and public domain photos more as I love to make collages and I really appreciate very much those who do. One great artist is @georgeboya who makes freakishly good and inspiring collage art.

Haven't made a new mandaloscope in a while so I thought I should do one. This hummingbird was one of the images used in NFT Showroom online art show at the end of October and I got inspired. Yes, it took me this long to write about it.

The original hummingbird can be found from the internet, for example with the search words: hummingbird transparent cc0.

I thought that it needed a tongue and a fiend to be all humminbirdy.

And then few more friends.

I copied and copied and copied the birds again and again, made them smaller and put one layer after another on top of each other so that I got a background from the original two bird transparent image for the four bird circle. And added something abnormal that breaks the repetition a little.

Now it's a hummingbird spike ball.

Other news
Thank you so much @richardfyates for buying one of my bodyswappers, New sport: theatrical Nordic walking jump, @rektdoteth for taking one virus out of my hands and @isaria for investing in Bald and beautiful! Have I thanked you before? If I have, here's a second round.