Colab Art Through Steemit with @allyinspirit

This post is about the results of an art collaboration with @allyinspirit.
Awhile ago I was browsing steemit and came across one of Alison's posts on some art she'd done. It resonated with me for a few reasons. Firstly the artwork itself is absolutely gorgeous.

Original art by @allyinspirit.
She made this beautiful artwork called 'Living in Bliss in the Hinterland' by painting on silk. The vivid colours and level of detail she's achieved is quite remarkable. She says the painting is essentially about transformation, change and healing which is why she wanted to make it available through a creative commons license.

I've come across creative commons images before as a designer, but didn't know there were 6 different types. I learnt something new about how to use those licenses from reading her post. The license she used is the creative commons share alike license, meaning anyone can alter her art if they give her credit. The new art also automatically carries the same license. I think it's great that more steemit artists are embracing creative commons as it makes collaboration a lot easier. If you read my blog you'd know that I dabble with art. As soon as I saw this post I wanted to try a collaboration with the image, but it inevitably got procrastinated. Having caught up with the most pressing work that needs to be done, I took this idea off the back burner and gave it a shot.

A lot of the time I don't know what my art is going to look like when finished. Sometimes it happens intuitively, and sometimes it revolves around the spark behind an idea. Drawing also helps me think, and to get into a creative mood I picked up some art supplies and began sketching. I wanted to follow the theme of change and healing and so thought I'd use imagery of nature, tadpoles and other pond life to convey it. I start as usual with a pencil outline, colour over it and finish with pens. This sort of happened naturally as I wasn't paying too much attention to what was happening on my paper.

This ended up being off-center and din't look so great when combined with the original.

The great thing about software is that I could isolate individual parts of my drawing and reuse them in new iterations of a collaborative effort to create different types of things.

A flower made from the fish bodies and tadpole-eyes.

A simple edit using a well known metaphor for change, a butterfly made from drawn patterns.

These days phone apps can do a lot to edit images and so out of curiosity to see what trippy patterns I could come up with I put the art through Mirror Lab to get these results.

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I then combined some of these images to get some mega fractals.

This was a fun exploration. I'm still dipping my toes in the artist community on steemit, but I'm excited about more collaboration and what the future holds. I will also probably start making more of my own art under creative commons.

Read @allyinspirit's original post here

In the spirit of collaboration, I'll be splitting this post's SBD with her.

All the images in this post are free to use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License