Walker process

Now for a little creative insight. I made this post separate so I can keep it exclusive to you lovely patrons:)

It’s that time of year where I do a lot of country cruising, so I’m especially inspired to capture the natural landscape these days. Furthermore, this is a study from a single photograph I took just a couple weeks ago. Typically, I like to improvise and imagine my art, as I find simple observational studies a bit dry on a creative level. However, it’s an important practice to accelerate learning, and open the bandwidth to greater possibilities within the imagination.    

Even with heavily referencing a single photo, there’s a great deal of creativity involved. First of all, I took the photograph. While I often use references, I rarely create a composition from a single reference photo unless it’s a vision a snapped myself. I feel this keeps the art more authentic, but even if I just grabbed a pic off google, there’s something magic that happens when translating into pixels.    

For this piece, I cropped a section of a photograph to get the basic composition I wanted. I got my colors by directly sampling sections of the photograph, but then applied adjustments to make it more stylized and expressive. I kept the composition very close to the photo while taking only minor liberties on scale and position. I observed the photo reference to the side as I created my piece. In doing this I must interpret the photo into clusters, and freely embellish wherever I see fit. However, if you attempt to trace directly over a photo you lose this personal vision and it will just end up looking like a pixelated photo. 

I found this to be a valuable exercise, as I can get stuck in my own head, and stuck in tiresome habits sometimes. I’ve been taking a lot of good photos lately, and I think I’ll have to do more of these. Hope you like it!

188x128px
23 colors
Photoshop

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