Take Photo

While hiking near Lake Arrowhead on a photo shoot, I discovered a tree trunk with sap dripping down the side. The colors were so brilliant that I took a few photos of it. While viewing on my iPad, the sap started to look like figures to me, so using Sketch Club, I drew some lines around the figures I found. 

There seemed to be a gent with hands in his pocket on the left and I wanted to emphasize this figure.

Below is a step by step tutorial for the creation of this image "We are the Dance". This edit was done on an iPad 4. 

Below is the original image (shot with iPhone 5s using native camera app) after cropping in Snapseed - It was a figurine I saw in a model home which I held against a blank wall to get a solid background. 

Next step was to invert the image in Adobe Photoshop Express. The Invert filter can be found under Looks in the filter menu.

Next step was to open the above image in Snapseed and convert it to black and white and increase the contrast.

I'm super excited about this giveaway. At first glance you may think that Sketch Club is only for people who like to create digital drawings and paintings. That's how I was introduced to it. Back in the days when I was selling my digital art creations, it was my app of choice. When I began my iPhoneography journey, I didn't think it would be of much use, but boy was I wrong!

Keep reading to find out how you can win a copy of this app!

Layers ~ It's my go-to app for working with layers. Although there is no mask function I still use it as my first choice because of two great features - you can zoom to 12800% magnification. YEP! That's right, 12800%. You can almost erase or recolor a single pixel! The second feature that I love about Sketch Club is the ability to rotate your photo rather than your device. Then all you do is tap with three fingers on the screen and it returns to the correct orientation at 100% zoom.

Painting Backgrounds ~ Often photos of people have busy backgrounds and I choose to paint over them. Sketch Club is great with the variety of brushes included with the app and the brush library. You can even create your own brush from any image and save it to Sketch Club.

Blur - A Blur brush is included in the Tools, and the opacity and strength are adjustable, so you can use it to blur parts of your image - remember that 12800% magnification and rotation feature I told you about? Well they come in handy here as well.

Smudge - Like the Blur brush, the Smudge brush can be customized for strength and opacity but you can also vary the style of brush too. This is a great one for those painterly images!

Textures - There's also a texture library within the app that you can use to layer over your work, or import any texture image from your device.

There's a social aspect to Sketch Club if you choose to participate - app.sketchclub.com. You can check out the work of other artists for inspiration, participate in daily challenges or visit any of the online forums where you can find everything from classes, tutorials and even stylus suggestions. 

Below is a digital painting I did completely on Sketch Club (mainly done with the Vector Brush) - You can even record your drawing session and upload it to YouTube!

But that's not all! There's a FREE Zine which you can get through iTunes as well - You can download the app here.

I have five promo codes to give away for Sketch Club - Requires iOS 5.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. Just leave a comment below and I'll be choosing five lucky winners on Friday, April 25 at 9 AM PDT. Good Luck!

Sketch Club App
Sketch Club Online 
Sketch Club Forums
Sketch Club Zine
Sketch Club Help

World Cup © Geri Centonze

Everywhere you go there's a lot of hype about the World Cup. When I hear "World Cup" I see a "literal vision" in my mind of the world in a cup so I decided to create an image based on the vision in my mind's eye. 

Here's how I accomplished my vision. We were out looking at model homes yesterday in Southern California and I was on the hunt to find a globe and a cup to photograph.

I succeeded! I got lucky because I was able to photograph them both against a solid background and the lighting inside the model home was decent. 

For the editing process I layered the image of the globe on top of the image of the cup (I used the cup on the left) in the Sketch Club app. Sketch Club is my go-to layering app only because I'm really familiar with it so I can do my work quickly. I erased everything around the globe and positioned it on top of the cup using the Transform tool in the layers menu.

While still in Sketch Club I used the eyedropper tool to match the color of the area around the cup and painted over it with a soft brush to get rid of the cup on the right. The result was a little rough, so I then opened the image in Repix and brushed over it with the Chalk brush to smooth and blend a bit. I learned this trick from my friend Jane Fiala (thanks Jane!)

I did some cropping and tuning in Snapseed but needed to add a bit of space around the left side of the cup and globe, so I opened the image in AntiCrop to add more pixels on the left. 

The text was added with PathOn - with this app you can draw a path with your finger and the text will follow that path - very cool!

Final touch was to take the image with the text into Stackables where I used one of the formulas to filter the image to my liking. 

Good luck to all those vying for the World Cup! 

I normally feature a showcase or artist for Mob Paint Monday. I have some in the works which I'm looking forward to sharing when they're ready. In the meantime, I don't want to let Monday pass without sharing something for the painterly mobile artists.

Today I 'll be sharing the Artomaton app. On the App Store Description, it's dubbed as an Artificial Intelligence Artist. The app is Free with available in-app purchases. It comes standard only with the Oil and Sketch modes. For 99-cents each you can purchase Color Pencil, Crayon, Pastel, Ghosts, Cubic, Watercolor, Pointil, Snowflakes, Sketch & Water - or go for the whole set - All Styles for $2.99. 

When you select a preset, you will be shown a preview of the results. To show you some samples, first I'll share the unedited image (below).

The real power of this app is the ability to customize the settings using the sliders at the bottom of the screen to make your adjustments (iPad screenshots are shown in this post). You can adjust fineness which determines the "fineness" of the strokes. Density controls the "density" of the strokes and Self-Color determines how accurate the final rendering is to the original color of the photo. Sliding to the left produces a less reality based color scheme.

With this app, you also have the ability to increase detail in an area by sliding your finger over the area as it renders. If you want to stop and save the image while it's processing you can also do that by pressing the arrow button and then saving before it's completed the rendering process.

Back in the days when I did digital scrapbooking working in Photoshop, I discovered a site, Shadowhouse Creations created by Jerry Jones. Jerry generously creates these textures and offers them for FREE to anyone who would like to download them.

His Terms of Use are simple and straightforward and his textures can be used for personal or commercial projects. Use any blending app to layer textures over your images. Apply different blending modes for various results. I use Sketch Club because it allows me to transform the layered texture to fit the aspect ratio of the photo I'm working on. You can add the textures above or below your image. Experiment and see what you like best. Or, try the Diana Photo app ($0.99) and let the presets in the app do the magic for you.

Below are some samples using various Shadowhouse Creations textures and the Diana Photo app.

Here's the most recent set featured on his site - clicking on the image will take you to Shadowhouse Creations so you can download the zip file. Most of the files in this set are 3600 x 2800 pixels.