The Rose Of Gauguin

David, I really like this version. Well done!

Sharon,

Good morning, thank you,

Dave

David, like the work and the direction you seem to be headed.

This is incredible! It's always a joy to return to previous work and utilize the skills developed overtime. I myself have been goin through old sketchbooks and touching up old worf, instilling new photoshop work on past pieces, ect.

Un fortunately I have never really liked Gauguin's work, so this doesn't do a lot for me.
However, in general, I prefer your later work.

David, it's amazing, I sat and looked at it for several minutes and it's really good. I can see the works of Paul Gauguin in the petals of a rose. Amazing!

I like it. Would love to hear more about your process. What goes into the selection of the pieces for each petal? I've always wanted to do something like this on paper. I agree that this is a good direction!

Are you asking for a critique?
I wouldn't want to offer an unsolicited one....

I don't like it. Too many elements competing for attention.


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

DAn! I was waiting to see if he wanted a critique.,,,

That wasn't a critique. That was feedback. When someone opens a post dedicated to their art, they want feedback. Otherwise what's the point?


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

that's what i'd assume. otherwise it's a me thread, and those never go over that well. i have input, but i'll stay silent until otherwise noted. the only question i have is - why did it take 5 weeks to make this?

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

well ,he asked Abbie's forgiveness, so I guess it isn't intended to be a critique thread...those are allowed.
Forgiveness would be sought for opening a thread about a new piece of art, which Abbie has already dissed on several occasions.

Hmmmm. Maybe we're supposed to show our art that's taken five weeks to complete. Here's mine:













Awesome, isn't it?


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

Dan, my snarky fan.
Your ban is gonna take 5 seconds to complete...lol

LOL !

Dan,

The work back before Thanksgiving 2014 took five weeks because the workflows were totally new to me.
It was exhausting. The results were exactly what you said too many elements competing. The contrast,
brightness and colors were wrong. On Friday evening I decided bright and early on Saturday to revisit this work.
It is far better now than the working copy. The image has many flaws. That said all art is full of flaws. Art is problem
solving. In the process of solving one problem others are created.

Marlene,

You are welcome to critique THIS work anytime in the here and now on this thread. It is open season.

I WILL take what you have to say as sage advise/critique. It often is.

If your advise is hostile I will graciously ignore it.

Assume I am not revisiting this process right away. Although I have plans for a
simpler work where the elements are not in heavy competition for attention. The Red Lily.

Dave

PS Marlene, It is 12:38 EST and I am contemplating hitting the closed thread button. Where are you? LOL

"The results were exactly what you said too many elements competing."

Then nothing has changed.
Art school would be a big help to you, David. Make that a goal.


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

What Dan said, and also, try to create SOMETHING OF YOUR OWN instead of taking the work of old masters and fiddling with them. Just sayin'.

The shape of the rose wasn't immediately obvious - perhaps a little more work needed to fit the borrowed images to the contours of the petals. The green box preview shows the edges of the petals as being very rough - was that intentional, or was the rose photo out of focus to start with?

the problems this image has:

1. those white spaces - fill it in with petals.
2. as dan said, too many things compete with each other.
3. the objects don't bend around the petals, that tree on the left is especially distracting
4. there is no shading in this. a rose or any other shape will have contours which is shown with highlight and shadow detail. at the same time the inner parts of the flower, the image should get softer to show people what's in focus.
5. it doesn't really look like a flower of any kind
6. and i don't get why this particular image for this shape.

if i were making this i would get a nice rose image, something with nice lighting. make it a black and white, adjust the contrast so the highlight and shadows are bold, but not a 100% white or black. then mask each petal out and place your image over each mask. unchain the mask so you can move the painting around freely. use transform warp and puppet warp mash the image to fit the contours of each petal. the original flower layer should be placed on top, set to overlay, which you'll have to make brighter later. and maybe hard light, but toned down.

otherwise you'll have to hand shade each petal, which would probably work better in the long run.

ideally though, i don't see why your relying on some other painting. go out and shoot some stock of your own. like a rose image using roses as the texture.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Art school would be a big help to you, David. Make that a goal.

Dan,

I have an art school background. Kind of a crazy statement you are making. Crazy because it is one image.
I did not like the outcome from day one. I only recently modified into something workable. Plenty of folks have
come out of art schools and never had their own constructs after a life time of struggle. One piece and I need to
go to art school? Think first.

Mike,

I had only been working with Photoshop a month when I began this image back in October 2014. Many of the technical
workings you are discussing I learned along the way. By Thanksgiving I realized certain approaches I made to this work
were not as good as others I might have done.

I rely on PD images for a good reason, and if you dont know that oh well. Subject matter is important in an image. Modern
abstract work is hugely problematic in that regard. By using PD works I bring import to the subject matter.

JL, we have been down this road before. Artists have creative license. I would not deny you either.

Jane, you are right the shape is somewhat problematic. Dan's point that too many images are competing does two things
all at once. One it makes the work interesting to some folks that it can be built up so far, but two the shape gets lost to some degree. People
can very easily like searching through this image or just see it as overload. It can go either way.

Folks one thing, dont take too much pride in tearing it down. Put up your own works for a critique and your results will shock you.
I have known for months now that this work was problematic. I did not publish it back in mid November 2014.

All art is problematic. If you post for critiques we all will find plenty of problems with each of your images. Just ask any of us.

Mike I did make it black and white and contrast it better. That is why I only published Rose No 1 and Rose No 2 back in mid November.2014.




I am less irritated than usual with this process. None of you have said anything I dont know, except Dan who told me I need to
double down on my art school tuition. Actually after inflation he told me to waste a ton of money. Dan??? One work of art that I know went
wrong and go get my first art school experience??? Think man!!!

Dave

i say, make a new one with what you know now. didn't you go to school for art history? that's not exactly what i'd call art school. learning about techniques, and such with hands on work.

technically my work is open to critique from every buyer that comes onto the site. i critique my own work, it has to get by my own standards in order to pass.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

David, I say this with the intent of kindness and with a voice of experience in sharing and selling artwork.

You don't need to get upset nor should you spend a lot of time defending your work or your process. Our art is intensely personal to us all, especially when you're new to a medium and are finding your feet, as it were. You're new to this type of artwork. You're not in a place where you can be objective enough about your own work to incorporate the critique offered without feeling defensive. This isn't a weakness on your part, it's a part of development with any skill.

I can use martial arts as a metaphor. If a very young student came to me and asked about their sparring footwork, I would tell them it needed a lot of practice and that it was hesitant and imprecise. But the student shouldn't defend his effort at that point, because it is what it needs to be at that stage of his experience. He can't walk away from that critique and suddenly have the skills to do everything the way someone who has been practicing for years has. Knowing the difference between where you are and where you want to be is frustrating enough, you don't need that gap reinforced at this point.

Everyone who learns anything goes through a cycle of stages.

1. Unconscious incompetence (you're bad, but you don't care)
2. Conscious incompetence (you're still not good, but it's frustrating now because you're trying to improve)
3. Conscious competence (you can do what you want with the skill, but you have to focus pretty intently)
4. Unconscious competence (you can do what you want with the skill without thinking about it.)

At step 4, it's time to challenge yourself and you go back to step 1. Repeat until death. :)

KEY: It's only at step 4 that you can incorporate targeted improvements. To try to do so any earlier only results in frustration. You have to have foundation.



So with all due respect, don't ask for critique yet. I know everyone says you must get critiqued to learn and all that, but if you must have critique, be selective about who you ask, and take it seriously, and objectively. Privately is also a good idea.

Find yourself, and your artwork, on your own. Share your work by all means, but don't feel compelled to defend where you are at any point. Just practice. Practice practice practice. Make art and practice. Play. Learn your medium. At that point you will welcome critique, and you'll get a lot out of it.

Mike,

There were studio and drawing classes in there as well.

Mike,

Please put up a work for us to critique. Or open up your gallery for trained artists to critique.

It could be fun. And you might find out you need to go to art school.

Let us tell you how we see your art. We wont hide the truth. Good or bad it would be totally
liberating for you. This wont hurt a bit.

Dave

Cynthia,

Thanks for the good advice and kind words.

Any piece of art is problematic. All art is problematic. My art is no different.

Dan is completely right about this one work. And it goes further into shape, contrast, and color.

I did not publish it for a reason. What people are seeing here is better than what it was.

I was an A student at UCONN, Dan, because I thought things through deep and fast. The constructs
I am using are very advanced. They create fine art not decor. The constructs are cutting edge. The one
piece was overload in my second month of making Photoshop works.

Dan, I know my favorite professor has retired by now. LOL There is no going back.

Dave

Sorry,
David....I was in real life, enjoying my granddaughter and 2 grand dogs....faa cannot compete with real life.
For starters, look at a real rose. Look at the simple perfection in nature....follow the concentric lines and movement of those lines inward and outward. Study that damn rose for 2 weeks, look at little else. Learn how light plays on the face of the petals, the shadows create the 3D depth and the highlights tickle the edges of each petal. Take tons of pictures of that rose....become that rose.
When you KNOW a rose, then move on to looking at the elements you have chosen to build your rose. If they don't work, toss them out, ruthlessly.
If you want to create a rose, you need to follow the formula that already works....you are recreating the wheel, so to speak...and if you cannot come up with a better version, let it go.

I'll leave my suggestions at that for now with the minor addition of learning your technical tools first before trying to create a product.
The time you spent on this piece was about learning how to use your materials...that is not the time spent on a piece of art. Learn the difference.

And drop the notion that art is problematic...it should not bring you angst, but a sense of freedom instead...it has no limits...it should be joyful to create. If it isn't, you are still struggling with technical basics of tools and elements of good design. LEARN

Two things that will surely inhibit improvement and growth are thinking too highly of oneself, and being overly defensive. More food for thought.

^5 Cynthia

dave i did that for years until the site burned down. i'm outside the critique phase and the last time i tried it, no one could help since i guess it was beyond their skill levels?

i'm not the one that needs the critique and you left it open to be critiqued. don't ask what you can't handle. it's not about me posting something up. you decided to share this with us, and we told you what we thought. maybe you were looking for compliments, i really don't know. never let compliments get in your way, too many are trying to be nice, but either don't have the background to say why they like it. or they are just being nice. so anyone that gives you solid advice, like i did, try what i said, it will help you. that advice will look sour compared to the compliments you might have gotten.

if someone compliments you - ask them why they like it. if they can't tell you exactly why they like something - then acknowledge what they said, then ignore the answer. someone who knows what they are talking about will tell you why they like it or why they don't. and the skilled people will tell you how to fix it.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Marlene,

Thanks for showing up. Your grandchild and the dogs sound like fun.
I am meeting my parents for lunch three hours from now to celebrate my birthday back
on Friday. I am now 52.

All of those thoughts went through my mind back in October 2014. I chose a simplified rose to boil the process down.
I studied a lot of other roses. If I had gone with another rose I would have compounded the problems by 5 fold.
Roses are very subtle. Using PD works to make a very complicated subtle intricate translucent rose? Wont work. Not
on your first try. Perhaps never. My works ended up with a product. The two products were simplified again for publication.

I chose a concept that was way over my head. I did not at that time know how far over my head. The work failed. That
never stopped me, Dan, in art school. I do not play it safe in the arts.

I ruthlessly shelved the work. I published works put into gray scale and colored cyan and rose sepia. That choice stopped
a good bit of the conflict. By altering the contrast in that process I got a bit of a pop in those two versions.

The choice of any PD art pieces to make petals out of is problematic because of the collage of colors conflicting across
the new image. Any PD art works for this type of work are troublesome. Mike has mentioned some of the work around procedures,
but they are still very crude. As Dan is saying it becomes overload. The real problem is the layers are completely flat till shading is
put in place. So colors on a flat surface have to now pop with fake shading. Mike would have done the shading better, but the colors and
conflicts would not have subsided. And if you color adjust one petal, god bless you when you color adjust the next 17 petals. We
are talking Photoshop. 18 petals is a simplified rose. I have not gotten into the shaping of the petals. Again I chose simple over
massively complex.

A couple of weeks later by Thanksgiving I began a process of understanding what additional processes I needed to learn.

I had in all fairness learned a great deal in that five week period.

Marlene......thanks.....

Dave

then why did you choose a really busy image for this flower? why not a monet or something that has softer lines?

another way to shade as you go is to add a style layer on it. using a combo of inside shadow and a gradient overlay (either linear or the striped one), you can balance out the shading that way as you go. each petal is an image and if each petal is oversized, they would overlap, you add a shadow style underneath. making something that looks 3d is always tough, its always a balance of light and shadows. but the piece you use is just as important. personally i would have tried this without the image. or chose something much softer.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

I'll just say the those blank white spaces need to be filled. They are distracting.(Top and bottom left)

Monet does not have softer lines etc.....I actually thought of using Monet's works.
The other downside with Monet was finding images of his size wise that I could use.
Monet's work is busy as well.

Monet and Turner have somewhat similar styles when comparing Monet's cathedrals to Turn's parliament burning.
The swirls of color would be worse for this project. And Monet's lilies are actually hard colors. Plus you can not
use all the same colors hard or soft to make the images individually stand out so the petals can be seen as
individual.

A lot of thought was put into this failed or not.

Jessica, many folks would agree with you.

Dave

I love it!! I believe it would make a great conversational piece...much going on to get many aspects!

Annette,

Thanks. I have had nightmares at first over this work. Headaches.

The concept is very complex. I take some pride in that, but the work
is an early work of mine that in earlier versions failed miserably.

It is a very difficult undertaking.

Dave

Mike,

Be my guest try and make one of these roses.

Good luck,

Addition: prepare to use over 2 GB of your hard drive and use over 200 layers.

Dave

i can tell you that i have no reason why i would want to do that. nor would i bother since there is no market for it.

most of images are well over 2gb. you don't need that many layers for an image like this, and 200 is really nothing. that's why i tell you to use styles, you don't need a dozen layers for each piece its all in one. i can see doing this in about 10 layers, the rest are masks. i find there is little point in making too many layers, it only makes the file huge and it slows down the machine badly.


this image had well over 1200 layers, many of which i had to combine, the text itself takes up a layer.

i can't imagine why you needed 200 layers for the rose.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Mike,

What are styles?

Addition: I have seen the word in my textbooks, but I think you mean something different.

Dave

Now , let's get to the critique...one element at a time.
A viewer must have a path for his eye to move..to keep him engaged so his brain can follow a path and enjoy it. That's about a center of interest and the elements of design that create movement to it and away from it.
I see chaos....right side up, upside down images...no center of interest, no place to rest....just a collage.
where do you want the eye to land and stay? How long do you want a viewer to stay engaged? How will you get the viewer engaged?

Patterns in color, lights and darks, repetition of shapes, will all do that.

Right now, I don't even know which side should be up with those strong upside down faces at the bottom....my brain won't stay on this image if you confuse it.

Sidebar - Marlene - I really enjoy hearing your critiques of artwork - you always bring up a level of depth that seems to be missing in others critiques - which I try to apply to my own internal critiques of my work. So thanks!

Back to the discussion....

You could adjust the thickness of the petal-defining lines. It would help to settle the sight on the picture. My eyes see too many things at once when I look at the first picture. Too much info not compartmentalized. You want a rose and you want Gauguin. Now the rose almost disappeared and it's almost a stew of Gauguin's work. Note that I am not a painter or photographer.

Marlene,

Yes it is an interesting failure.

I know.

When I put up the two other versions in my portfolio it is as if they are sconces, place holders.
They serve less of a purpose.

The eye control sucks.
The colors clash.
The contrasts dont work.
The images are all over the place.
The shapes are not quite right.
The rose is over simplified.
The patterns are complex to the degree of overload.

We can add to the list.

I know it is failed.

I posted it because I reworked it. Some of you wanted to critique, so I said yes.
Brave sole that I am. I dont mind in the least. I just want Dan to know I am educated.
People on Wall Street with more education than I have fail as well. They just dont tell
you when they have failed.

It is still failed. But of all my failures I like this one the best.

Dave

It is not a failure if you learned from it.

Antonin,

I was making collages with far more eye control.

I wanted a vehicle that was very different for my collages.

So I made a rose.

The idea is to make an object using PD works where the object
becomes more important.

Addition: Antonin, I learned a lot. I succeeded. YES!! The rose failed.

Dave

Mike,

Two years ago I was not working with PS. I was only teaching myself PS.

Now hands on I will reread that info on styles. It could add a lot.

I appreciate the suggestion.

At the same time I am learning a lot more about color masks now.

The work is getting more complex and controlled.

Dave

in the layer palette there is a button FX. you can download and save styles as well. the style will let you overlay a shadow, inner shadow, glow, color, pattern, bevel, and many other things, all in one shot. its what i use when i want to make pipe, wire, do odd shading. the gradients are a pain to use because you have to move the gradient with the mouse, and it wasn't all that obvious i could do that.

there is a learning curve in using them, but once you have it, it's a very powerful tool. make things look like metal, place bevels on things, i make my beveled glass that way.


i used a style to keep all the letters looking the same.


i added bevels around the metal, and dents for the screws. the list can go on.

be sure to add styles at the end, because it does slow the system down. it counts as many layers, but you can adjust them, copy and paste them, or save them for later. i light lamps with it, add candle glow, wood grain, add patterns, etc.

i suggest as an exercise, don't go back to the old stuff, start a brand new one.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Mike,

That was very helpful. Thanks!!

I need to reread this stuff in the first textbook.

i wont apply it again to the Rose.

The 200 layers on the rose were all sorts of things along those lines. Mainly shadows and highlights.

I need to bone up on how to use masks as well, so I will sit down for an hour or two
and reread all those materials. Easy pick'ens now.

Dave