Flight of Fancy

1/31/21

    Welcome to the introduction of my 2022 calendar. This December composite photo for PFCC  was the genesis for next year’s theme. I had so much fun making it, and it seemed fairly impressive to me, so I decided to do another 12 or 13 for a calendar. My next several  challenge entries were all butterflies, and I made a bunch more using different colors and textures. I call them my flights of fancy. I was able to use Photoshop for the iPad to do much of the masking. I find it easier to draw around the edges using a pen, rather than a mouse. Yes, I know the iPad can serve as a second display, but I haven’t yet figured out how to mirror what I see on the big monitor.

    To add to the momentum, Shutterfly had a big sale on calendars last weekend: $8 instead of $30! I ended up only having to finish one more butterfly to get enough for the calendar. So, now I have a dozen 2022 calendars sitting on my desk ready for next Christmas. I may try, again, to sell a few at the Art Center. It seems that paper calendars have gone out of favor.

    The butterflies are all based on four different species from PixelSquid (which makes spinnable 3-d objects) that I could adjust to many different angles and views. Some oof the images were textures and images (PixelSquid, AdobeStock and Unsplash) overlaid on the wings to see the vein textures, and on others I replaced the pattern entirely with images and textures. All of the butterflies were set on a different background, although there are more natural blues and greens since that’s somewhat  natural habitat. ;-)