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Description
Also seen at my main account, =lauraneato : [link]

This is entirely a 100% digital painting (which makes this the FIRST and ONLY/LAST painting I'd ever have done for art school, since I've never taken a painting class nor will I ever get the chance to since I'm graduating in a month and a half). (The girl was originally a photograph I applied a painting filter to, but then overrode that filter with my own painting touches). I made this by taking about 200 different photographs of China, going through them all, lassoing out my favorite pics, arranging them in a composition, then putting a white layer over it, setting the transparency to 20% or so on it, then on layers above that, literally digitally painted the photograph collage from underneath it, often sampling the original colors. Then, realizing to my horror that my painting still looked like the collage, I started messing with the colors, realized that wasn't working, so decided to give the picture a theme.... which really wasn't that different from my original intent. I originally had it in mind that my final project for China would deal with the haze constantly in the air of China, which made everything slightly grayscale. I asked my teacher why the heck it was so hazy, and was it ALWAYS hazy like this? And she said it's just this part of China, in the mountains, and in the winter it's especially hazy... though even when we weren't in the mountains it was hazy, so I just ahd to wonder where the hell it all came from. When I present this piece to her tomorrow, she's going to get a kick from it because it not only answers my question I asked her during the trip, but ROFL I even painted our bus as a cameo in the background (and I used an actual pic of the side of the bus for reference too, so that's definitely our bus). Now I have to go home and work on some more sketches of China to present in a book (I need to earn 3 credits for this class, and I dont know if just one digital painting will pull off the job, but we'll see), and my meeting with her is on Friday, so wish me luck. I actually am proud of the end result. I just hope it prints well >_>

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Edit: More about this pic.

The girl is a Hmong ("Miau") long-skirt dancer in traditional festival costume. I took this picture of her after her village gave us 12 shots of rice wine each, and half of us were drunk during the dancing show (it's tradition to give 12 shots of rice wine to visitors to the village. Their strange form of traditional greeting, though I'm not complaining).

The strange sticks are actually prayer posts. I don't know the official name for them, but they are set up by villagers when they go to a shrine and make a wish (often for children/fertility), and when they have their wish granted one day, they return to the shrine and put up one of those kinds of posts. Outside of Zhaoxing at the shrine along the rice patty, there were dozens of these things. They were a little daunting in a way... They looked like some weird Chinese version of alien symbols in corn fields.

The mountains were taken along the river in Guilin. They're made of limestone, and all the mountains in Guilin look like that. I like to think of them as "Dragonball mountains."

The carved mountain in the background is rice terraces... and the mountain with the road in it was actually picture of the road I featured over at my lauraneato account, the one that was filled with boulders and had a dropoff of like, a thousand feet to our doom.

The bus was the bus we rode along that road of doom.

The weeds are from a pic I took of a cliff dropoff... those reeds were the last things you saw before a drop of death. I took it right around the time the group almost abandoned me at some random market for an hour and a half...

The ground plane (that's covered in mist/haze) was from a scenic shot of rice terraces along the boulder road of doom.

Everything else is just special effects : P ... 68 layers for the whole thing... A rather exhausting project, I assure you!

To see the original photo collage: [link]

Description
Also seen at my main account, =lauraneato : [link]

This is entirely a 100% digital painting (which makes this the FIRST and ONLY/LAST painting I'd ever have done for art school, since I've never taken a painting class nor will I ever get the chance to since I'm graduating in a month and a half). (The girl was originally a photograph I applied a painting filter to, but then overrode that filter with my own painting touches). I made this by taking about 200 different photographs of China, going through them all, lassoing out my favorite pics, arranging them in a composition, then putting a white layer over it, setting the transparency to 20% or so on it, then on layers above that, literally digitally painted the photograph collage from underneath it, often sampling the original colors. Then, realizing to my horror that my painting still looked like the collage, I started messing with the colors, realized that wasn't working, so decided to give the picture a theme.... which really wasn't that different from my original intent. I originally had it in mind that my final project for China would deal with the haze constantly in the air of China, which made everything slightly grayscale. I asked my teacher why the heck it was so hazy, and was it ALWAYS hazy like this? And she said it's just this part of China, in the mountains, and in the winter it's especially hazy... though even when we weren't in the mountains it was hazy, so I just ahd to wonder where the hell it all came from. When I present this piece to her tomorrow, she's going to get a kick from it because it not only answers my question I asked her during the trip, but ROFL I even painted our bus as a cameo in the background (and I used an actual pic of the side of the bus for reference too, so that's definitely our bus). Now I have to go home and work on some more sketches of China to present in a book (I need to earn 3 credits for this class, and I dont know if just one digital painting will pull off the job, but we'll see), and my meeting with her is on Friday, so wish me luck. I actually am proud of the end result. I just hope it prints well >_>

--

Edit: More about this pic.

The girl is a Hmong ("Miau") long-skirt dancer in traditional festival costume. I took this picture of her after her village gave us 12 shots of rice wine each, and half of us were drunk during the dancing show (it's tradition to give 12 shots of rice wine to visitors to the village. Their strange form of traditional greeting, though I'm not complaining).

The strange sticks are actually prayer posts. I don't know the official name for them, but they are set up by villagers when they go to a shrine and make a wish (often for children/fertility), and when they have their wish granted one day, they return to the shrine and put up one of those kinds of posts. Outside of Zhaoxing at the shrine along the rice patty, there were dozens of these things. They were a little daunting in a way... They looked like some weird Chinese version of alien symbols in corn fields.

The mountains were taken along the river in Guilin. They're made of limestone, and all the mountains in Guilin look like that. I like to think of them as "Dragonball mountains."

The carved mountain in the background is rice terraces... and the mountain with the road in it was actually picture of the road I featured over at my lauraneato account, the one that was filled with boulders and had a dropoff of like, a thousand feet to our doom.

The bus was the bus we rode along that road of doom.

The weeds are from a pic I took of a cliff dropoff... those reeds were the last things you saw before a drop of death. I took it right around the time the group almost abandoned me at some random market for an hour and a half...

The ground plane (that's covered in mist/haze) was from a scenic shot of rice terraces along the boulder road of doom.

Everything else is just special effects : P ... 68 layers for the whole thing... A rather exhausting project, I assure you!

To see the original photo collage: [link]