In honour of LMAC’s 100th week, I decided to make this Photo Mosaic using 40 images, including the winners (and some runners up) from selected contests starting with LMAC 31 which was the first contest on the new Hive blockchain.
On March 26, 2020 the community forked from steem creating a new home on hive blockchain. This is kinda where the idea for this collage came from... the combination of community and creativity is the strongest aspect of hive.
LMAC, and its community of artists, exemplifies this spirit of sharing and strength through creativity. The idea is quite a unique one when you get down to the heart of it, people are creating public domain art open for the world to use, while receiving rewards for their work through hive's consensus driven system.
Personally, LMAC has pushed me to learn many new techniques in photo editing, and I think that this feeds nicely into what I value most about LMAC. The community is very supportive, but I also value the educational and inspirational aspect of the lets make a collage community. By viewing other's entries I get ideas, and by researching techniques to realise these ideas I grow as an artist.
Lol, and I've only been entering for two weeks 😂 Although I have been watching from the sidelines for a while.
It's a brave new world on the blockchain, and these feelings definitely influenced the direction of the art I made today. The world of creativity floating in space with the glowing hive singularity emerging from its heart truly represents what hive means to me. It is a merging of creativity and code, an environment of ever evolving blockchain transactions, immutable yet illusive... just like humankind's creative spirit.
Also, I wanted to learn something new as I had never made a Photo Mosaic before, and was unaware of the process.
Little did I know I was opening an 8 hour can of worms 😂
Creative Process:
This will be a brief explanation of my process as it really did take a lot of time/steps and I don't want to bore people 😂
Step 1
First I looked through twenty of the past sixty nine finalists posts for various LMAC contests (starting from the first LMAC contest on hive as mentioned above), chosen at random, then selected my favourite among the runners up and the winner. All images sources are shared below... I took screenshots of some that were animated gifs for inclusion in the Photo Mosaic.
N.B. As all of these pictures are in the public domain I hope everyone is cool with me using them. I encourage anyone reading this blog to go and visit these awesome posts, and perhaps tip them using @peakd's tipping function.
Then the editing marathon got into its second leg:
Step 2
First I drew a basic Hive logo against a transparent background using the ellipsis tool in gimp then exported this to use as an element in the larger image.
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To create the Photo Mosaic panel (shared in step one) I basically followed the tutorial below, but after creating the layer which included many iterations of the 41 photos I realised that I wouldn't be able to get the effect I wanted as this tutorial shows how to apply a Mosaic to a single layer and I wanted to put it in only part (the planet) of my larger image.
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After thinking it over for quite a while I decided that I needed to isolate the two parts of the main image, so that I could isolate the photo montage to only show through on the planet by using the opacity settings for a layer where only the planet shows against a transparent background.
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I then saved two versions to separate PNG files, one with the planet on a transparent background, and another with everything other than the planet.
After re-sizing the Mosaic tile to best fit the area of the planet, I used the eraser tool to remove the edges of Mosaic that protruded past the planet.
I then added the hive logo into the white singularity area and erased the black circular outline as it didn't look very good. Then I did some last touch ups removing the portion of the hive logo that the planet was covering...
Something tickled my brain at this point... surely I'd forgotten something 🤣
Finally, I saved the high def image and then realized what I had forgotten... the fantastic frame @shaka sourced for us to use in our image.
I scaled this up using gimp to fit with the 4k image I had created and it was finally complete.
Time for a well-earned beer 🍻I think.
I hope you have enjoyed this trip into the combined creative universe of LMAC and hive.
Thanks 🙂
All image sources in this post are CC licence made using GIMP Photo Editing Suit.
I completely forgot to go to the advanced section on peakd at the end of writing this post to add @lmac as a beneficiary. After speaking to the mod @quantumg in the LMAC community discord they said I could send 20% of this post's payout in 7 days to be considered for the competition. Many thanks for accommodating this dozy hiver @lmac 😂
If you have enjoyed this creative post, please check out my homepage @raj808 for similar content.
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