I still run for fun the Museum of Block Art (MOBA) and, as part of sharing more of the behind the scenes of how the art is made, I wanted to show some of my drafts of my recent “Circling back” piece. It’s called Circling back because it’s a photo of my partner, available in the WordPress Photo Directory, from a trip we did to Montana that I really want to circle back on again.
I started out messing with one photo and playing with the gradients to be as weird as possible. This is how I usually start since the art is all virtual and it’s easy to restart. The ability to add transparency to the gradients is what made this fun, combined with duotone and an overlay color option. You have a shocking number of different levers you can pull to really get some strange effects. Once I started finding a look I liked, I then tried applying the same treatment to more images of her, thinking I would land on a grid of images. Again, all of the images I used are ones I have previously uploaded into the WordPress Photo Directory.
After going wide and far with the colors, I narrowed it down to a deep red. I’m drawn to red with these nature photos for some reason. Once there, it was then a matter of changing around where the circling landed and whether the lines were sharp or not. I let my partner choose the final look since it was a photo of her after all.
The Museum of Block Art (MOBA) pieces are often featured at the flagship WordCamp events so, if you want to try your hand at some art pieces that just might get featured, learn how to contribute here.
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