Picture Story: violet night

It occurred to me when I was scanning my 11X14 acrylic paintings that I was inevitably going to be making new scans of paintings that I have used as backgrounds for my illustrations. Yes, that's part of the magic of photoshop — the painting I used as the background of an illustration is actually completely separate from the illustration. Mostly because while I render the vast majority of the 'parts' of my illustrations by hand - ultimately they are digital collages and assembled on the computer.

So, it took me a ponderous moment of searching, but I found the "violet night" background.

It is via the magic of photoshop that this painting became part of the background of this illustration:

"violet night"

"violet night" was created mostly out of the parts of other illustrations. It's just one of those compositions I assembled for the fun of it.

The irises are something I created for "purple martins & purple irises" which is an image I originally made for one of my calendars (it was for June, since that's when my irises bloom). Anyhow, the irises were originally a pen & ink drawing, which I 'filled' in photoshop — the petals were created from parts of a scan of a salt on watercolor painting and the leaves were created from a scan of an acrylic painting.

The luna moths came from a graphite pencil drawing that I had done as a teenager for the county fair. I scanned them into the computer, colorized them, printed that file, and then colored over it with prismacolors, and scanned that back into the computer. The luna moths are kind of the only part I formatted specifically for this illustration, even though they originated with another composition.

The starry sky came from the background I made for "deer in the winter woods." This illustration was the January picture for one of my calendars. I'm pretty sure the star is a vector graphic, which I spent many hours rotating and layering in a file. For violet night - I used the graphic as a layer over the scan of the painting, and then literally faded out half the graphic with the eraser tool.

Obviously, I color adjusted the scan of the painting that I inevitably used as a background, because, well, I wanted it to be a cooler and bluer shade of violet.

I admit, there are some illustrations that I like just a little bit more, and "violet night" is one of them. Probably mostly because that's my favorite shade of violet — that sort of milky bluish violet color.