Garbage is one of my favourite things in life. Discarded tidbits, read not timbits, wherever my eye spots them. Thousands of photographs. Some really wild shots that I loved. Many mediocre ones. Enough are absolute trash, just like the trash subject matter. I would delete everything except the good shots and some that were mediocre, which I use as reference for carving miniature sculptures at times.

Before joining Hive, I never took my photography seriously. It was always a backseat base player to showcase my sculptures in the fine art world that I used to be a part of. If it wasn’t that, photography was playtime, or saving me drawing time. Be a good little workhorse camera and be a fun toy. Nothing more.

Digital art is all new to me as of this year. I’ve never done it before. Being on Hive inspired me, seeing so many digital art pieces that were interesting and beautifully created. Whole new world. I had to shift my way of seeing to create digital art. It boggled my mind a bit at first. So many options. So many styles. Where am I in that? I have no idea what I’m doing. Same thing with NFT’s. What’s all that? I’ve learned, with some bumps and blips.

I see my photos in a whole new light now. They are a great source of inspiration to create digital art with. Ones that would typically hit the recycling bin hard, utter trash. I rather enjoy hitting the delete button. Now I keep photos I’d trash because I see something in them that moves me to create a piece of digital art.

This is the only photo I used to create Soul Eater, completely unedited. This is a photo of a discarded black garbage bag that I found lying on grass after a heavy rain. I took several macro shots of it. None of them are usable as a photograph, they’re all trash photos, but I kept them for whenever, whatever I wanted to create. Garbage is glorious. Imagination is all that is required.

This particular one stood out to me. I could see a face in it. I liked the tones of blue-greys, the contrasts, the way the water droplets looked. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking through some photos for something else and stumbled across it. An urge to work on a digital art piece using it came from nowhere, so I just acted on it. All elements and colours are derived from the source photo. I created Soul Eater using Photoshop. I used five additional layers comprising elements cloned from the source photo, which I altered and blended into the base layer. The rest was completed using various brushes and hand painting.

I don’t take in process screenshots because it completely interferes with my creative process. When I create digital art, I don’t do a step by step process. I work very intuitively and loosely all over the whole piece at once. It’s a similar approach as that of actual painting.