Number Ninety-Two: Sky Blue Pink

Today's photo was also taken on our recent trip up to Ottawa. The sun was setting dramatically on the driver's side of the car but on the passenger side the sky was this gentle pinkish-blue and I loved it. I took some shots with Gorillacam then straightened and cropped the photo I liked best in Snapseed to get rid of the side of the road. I really wanted to showcase the gorgeous colours of the sky while leaving a bit of reference at the bottom.

My grandpa always called this kind of sky 'sky blue pink'. Pretty perfect name for it!

Number Ninety-One: The Return Of Door Number Ten And A Half

I decided to post the original picture of the doors from yesterday's entry. I'd considered doing so in the first place but went with the heavily edited one instead. Since then a couple of people have asked me about the doors and what they really look like so here they are! All I did was crop and add a Drama filter in Snapseed to bring out some of the detail.

Door 12 is actually the entrance to a little restaurant and I'm not sure what door 10 1/2 led to. I loved the colours and the weathered paint, plus the mysterious arrow-shaped metal things nailed to door 12.

Number Ninety: Door Number Ten And A Half

Today's picture was taken on our drive home from Ottawa after the fondue party and overnight stay. We had to stop in Smiths Falls and when we parked in front of these interesting doors I couldn't resist snapping a few shots with Gorillacam.

Shadow of Shadow A Day posted a link to an app I hadn't yet discovered. I was thrilled to find that it's exactly the kind of photo editing app I've been looking for and downloaded the full version immediately. It's called PhotoWizard and has a ton of effects and editing capabilities all packaged into an attractive, easy-to-use app that is worth far more than the small amount they charge for it. I used the Pop Art effect on these doors to make them even more interesting, and was happy that this particular filter retained the red and green paint.

Number Eighty-Nine: Closer Than I Appear

Today's picture was taken today on a snowy drive to Ottawa to visit family for a fondue feast. I was taking lots of shots from the car just to see if I got anything interesting and this one turned out pretty well. I'm really not all about the self portraits, I swear!

I took this one with Gorillacam and used Snapseed's Drama filter on it afterward.

Number Eighty-Eight: Probably Talking About World Peace

Today's picture was also taken at my sister's place on Christmas day. This is my daughter, the youngest of the cousins, and my sister's oldest son, the eldest of the cousins, sharing a moment at the kitchen island.

I took this shot using Gorillacam and imported it into Snapseed so I could use the Drama filter on it. I love how they look like they're deep in discussion!

Number Eighty-Seven: A Shadow For Shadow

Today's piece is in honour of my fellow 365-er, Shadow of Shadow A Day. Shadow's project is about capturing shadows every day and her collection is already fascinating! It's such a unique way to look at the world and I'm always excited to see what she comes up with every day.

I took this photo yesterday at Christmas dinner at my sister's place in Quebec. This is my beautiful niece's shadow against the wall under a neat painting of two olives on a toothpick. I used the iPhone camera to take the photo and then imported it to Snapseed where I used a Drama filter to brighen it up.

Number Eighty-Six: Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from Art On My iPhone! I hope you've enjoyed the project so far and I hope that you're having a wonderful holiday season, whatever you celebrate!

I started today's piece with the iPhone camera, trying to get a few shots of the ornaments on my mother's Christmas tree. I realized after that all of the reflective ones had me showcased, though, so decided to go with it and do a bit of a Christmas self-portrait doing what I love; using my iPhone to capture nice things. I cropped the photo in Snapseed then imported it to Artist's Touch where I used the fingerpaint brush on it, decreasing the size of the brush gradually as I worked my way in from the edges toward where I was centered in the ornament. I really liked the effect!

Number Eighty-Five: Through The Christmas Glass

Merry Christmas Eve! I love Christmas Eve almost more than Christmas Day. It was always a special night at our house when I was a kid with special snacks and family time and the anticipation of the next day making everything even more exciting.

It's not a very white Christmas around here this year. You can see the barest dusting of snow on the lawns in today's picture but that's all we've got thus far. It's not breaking my heart, personally, but I know it just doesn't feel like Christmas to a lot of people without heaps of snow. Anyhow; with the beautiful tree and my family it feels like Christmas to me no matter what.

Today's picture was taken with Gorillacam and edited in Snapseed with the Drama filter. Old standbys that give me the results I like.

P.S. Make sure you look at this one at full size by clicking on it. The glass globe looks neat and the details are lost in the smaller size.

Number Eighty-Four: Moon And Trees

Today's piece started with some snapshots I took a while back of the moon in the evening sky (as seen in number seventy-six and number seventy.) I'd cropped and fiddled with it a bit and I think I'd applied a drama filter to it in Snapseed then left it to sit, but I decided to see what I could do with it in NPtR since I've been playing around with that app a lot lately.

I used a round diffuse brush in the colour scratch setting and tried to make the lines radiate out around the moon, drawing fast so I'd get bigger circles. Then I used it in an upward direction on the trees in the lower left, going slower for smaller circles so the branches and trunks would be more defined. I kind of like how it turned out. It reminds me somewhat of Northern Lights.

Number Eighty-Three: The Tree

I was a bit nervous about the tree this year because Essie is not quite three and impulse control still isn't her strong suit. So far, though, she's been pretty great about it; only taking off a few ornaments here and there and being OK about having to put them back on the tree. She's started to realize, though, that I like to take pictures of special things and asks me to take a picture of the tree almost every day.

Of course I experimented with some of my apps and used Color Effects to take the colour out of everything except the tree, then imported that to Artist's Touch where I used the razor brush. I used a larger brush on the gray parts and a smaller one on the tree so that the tree really was the focus although I feel like the end result gives the impression of a brightly lit tree in a dark, abandoned house. Which is also interesting, so why not?

Number Eighty-Two: Cupcakes Are Serious Business

I came into the kitchen and found that my mom had set my daughter up at the kitchen table with a cupcake and a fork. Eating all that chocolate icing was a difficult task but she persevered!

It was so cute that I got out the iPhone and took a few shots with the iPhone camera, then later I edited this one in Snapseed; using a drama filter on it to make it pop a bit more. The better to enjoy the pineapple hairdo and chocolate face, of course.

Number Eighty-One: Blowing In The Wind

Today's piece began a couple of years ago on Wolfe Island, where we'd gone for a drive. We stopped and took a bunch of pictures of the wind turbines in the setting sun and they looked just gorgeous with the pink sunset reflecting off them against the blue sky. I decided to play around with my favourite one and see what I could do with it.

I started off by applying the Drama filter from Snapseed and loved what it did. Then I imported it into NPtR so I could experiment some more with the confusing settings in there. I used it on the 'scratch' setting with a round brush and managed to come up with something pretty pleasing, although I had to do a screen capture to save it at an acceptable size. That made it kind of pixel-y, so I then imported that one into Adobe Photoshop Express and used the reduce noise function a few times. This was the result!

If you live in the area and haven't done it already I definitely recommend taking a trip over to the island and seeing the turbines up close. They're seriously massive and awe inspiring!

Number Eighty: The Colour Of Temptation

Today's piece first started out as a photograph of an apple I took in the late summer using SynthCam, an app for taking photos with a shallow depth of field. I am not terribly good at using this app, unfortunately, but come back to it every so often. This was one of the rare ones that I was pleased with although the colour of the apple didn't contrast with the green of the grass enough for my tastes, staying a kind of washed-out pinkish-red.

It wasn't until I downloaded Color Effects that was able to give the apple the colour I wanted without messing with the green of the grass. Color Effects has replaced Dash Of Color for my colour isolation needs. It is far less buggy and has the option to recolour anything you want in any colour you want. I found when I played around with the app that I liked having just the re-coloured red apple against the black and white grass.

Number Seventy-Nine: Zoom Zoom

Today's painting is in honour of the fact that I have recently started driving again. I'm so excited to be behind the wheel for the first time in over a decade!

I first sketched this out in Scribblify, a painting app that is very fun to use even if the interface is a bit odd at times. The brushes are a lot of fun and you can create some pretty cool effects with minimal effort. After I finished that I imported it into Artist's Touch and used the exacto knife brush on it to give it a more painted look.

Number Seventy-Eight: Oddly Long-Necked Swan

Today's drawing was another one from Zen Brush. I like that app a lot and the pictures that I am most pleased with are always the ones I draw quickly and easily. Well, perhaps 'easily' is not the right word but they're the ones that seem to just happen, I guess. At first I wasn't sure about this swan but I saved it and later when I was looking through my photo gallery it jumped out at me and I realized that I liked it after all.

I can't remember which of the papers I used for this one but the app has a ton of backgrounds and papers to use and I liked the way it framed the swan.

Number Seventy-Seven: Penciled In

At my cousin's wedding a couple of months ago I took a bunch of pictures with my iPhone but none of them turned out very well. I took most of them at our table at the reception and for some reason most of them were of the awesome favour; a personalized shot glass filled with candy. My mom's purse was a fabulous gold-sequined number and I took a lot of shots of the glass in front of it. Sadly the colour of the photos wasn't very strong or accurate and so I haven't done anything with them.

Until now! I liked the blueprint effect in Artist's Touch so much that I was playing with it again and realized that there is more than one setting for it. You can set it to a black pen drawing or a pencil sketch as well as the blue pen. I used the pencil sketch on this one, then imported it to Snapseed to see what the Drama filter would look like on it. It looked great, so here it is!

Number Seventy-Six: Moonlit Fantasy

You might recognize today's piece as being a part of Number Seventy's triptych. I wanted to do more with this picture in particular so played around with it in NPtR, otherwise known as Non-Photorealistic Painter.

I'm not quite sure what to say about NPtR. It's a very interesting app that claims to be like scratching a film off of photos or pictures with various tools to reveal what's underneath. It's really not very much like that at all. The interface is also kind of non-intuitive and takes a lot of getting used to but I will admit that I enjoy the actual results I get even if I can't describe them very well.

NPtR also saves pictures at a ridiculously small size which I get around by taking screenshots instead of using the save function. Click to see this one at full size.

Number Seventy-Five: A Message In The Clouds

Today's piece started as a picture of a perfect sky I took with my iPhone camera back in September, not long after I got my iPhone. We were on a country drive and stopped to go on a tour of an old schoolhouse and I held my phone up and snapped this picture of a beautiful sky on an absolutely perfect day. I loved it and used it as my desktop picture for a long time since it always gives me the peaceful, happy feeling that day brought me.

Every now and again I like to play with WordFoto and see what I can do with pictures I love and used it to fill this picture with the words 'look up', something that I need to remind myself to do quite often.

Click to see it at full size, of course.

Number Seventy-Four: My Favourite Tree

This is a piece that I originally drew in Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas. I'm very fond of it for some reason but as is always my complaint about the pieces I draw in this app the finished product is blocky and small. So as I often do with pieces I want to improve I opened up Corel's Paint It! Now and used the Oil filter on it.

Of course that made me love it even more. Click on it to see it at full size!

Number Seventy-Three: Happy Flower

OK, I promise this won't become all colour isolation all the time. I couldn't resist one more for now, though, because the brightness of this flower makes me so happy. It's one from a series I took using Gorillacam and I used Dash Of Color to showcase just the flower.

I do thoroughly enjoy Dash Of Color but I'm finding that it crashes unexpectedly if I zoom in too much (where too much equals enough to have lots of control over where the colour is going.) It is a free app and if I'm careful not to zoom in quite so much it works fine but I would like to not have to worry about that. I'm going to see if I can find another comparable app for free but wouldn't mind paying a little to have the functionality without the bugginess.

Number Seventy-Two: Flags In The Morning Light

Today's piece was originally part of a larger photo that I took with the iPhone camera at a service station on the 401 while we were driving to Toronto. I cropped out the part of the photo I didn't like with Snapseed but the portion left was grainy and not quite nice enough to use on its own. As a result it sat around in my folder of possibilities until I decided to play around with it the other day.

All I did was import it into Adobe Photoshop Express and use the Reduce Noise filter on it until it looked more like a painting than a photograph. I liked the way it made the flags stand out; something they didn't do as well in the original.

Number Seventy-One: Essie On The Run

I took a lot of pictures of Essie in her costume on Halloween this year. Most of them turned out pretty well; in focus and showing off her cute little colourful witch costume. I kept coming back to one in particular, though, because I loved the movement and energy of it. It had lots of motion blur and really seemed to capture the way Essie operates.

Since I've been enjoying Dash Of Colour so much I decided to play with this photo and isolate the most important element of it; Essie. I seriously love how it turned out and I think it makes the picture exactly what it should be.

Number Seventy: Trying To Capture The Moon

Last night the moon was big and bright and Essie begged me to take some pictures of it. Because I don't have a fancy camera with fantastic zoom it's actually quite difficult to take good pictures of the moon but I obliged her and took a few anyhow. They mostly ended up as grainy shots of the neighbourhood trees against the sky with the moon just a bright white dot behind them. What I liked about them was that the sky was a different colour in each set since I made a few attempts over ten or so minutes.

So of course I played around with them to see what I could create. I ended up cropping a few of them in Adobe Photoshop Express and then used the reduce noise function over and over to achieve a sort of watercolour effect. I loved the results but since the cropped photos were small I chose the three I liked the best, used Snapseed's Drama Filter on them then brought them all together in a triptych using Diptic.

Click on the picture to see it at full size, of course.

Number Sixty-Nine: Playing With Colour

I took this photo of Mongkut after Essie decided to place this piece of cord along him. It was funny because instead of jumping up or trying to play with it he just sat there as still as possible as if he were afraid to displace it. So I grabbed my camera, fired up Gorillacam and took a bunch of photos.

Since the cord was such a bright, striking orange I played with the photo in Dash of Color and coloured just the cord, leaving the rest of the photo black and white. I loved how it turned out!

Dash of Color is a neat app that you can use to create photos with isolated spots of colour. To do so you have the option to paint with a colour pen or a gray pen, using the colour one to restore the original colour to the photo then using the gray one to touch up any spots you've accidentally coloured. It takes a little effort but it's nice to have so much control, plus the undo button remembers every edit instead of allowing you just one. For a free download it's fantastic!

Number Sixty-Eight: I Quit While I Was Ahead

I've been having a lot of fun playing around with Artist's Touch and seeing what it's capable of. I imported a heart doodle that I'd done previously using Meritum Paint Pro because I liked the colours and wanted to see how the various brush effects handled them. One of the things that Artist's Touch does, however, is overlay a blueprint of the picture you're using on the canvas. You can turn it off if you like but I was pleasantly surprised by how much more I liked the blueprint of the original picture.

So I took a screenshot and here it is!

Number Sixty-Seven: Cabbages And Kings

This picture was taken when the weather was warmer. It's been kind of unseasonably warm the last few days here in Eastern Ontario but still; I do miss the summer. This is a kind of cabbage-y ornamental plant of my mother's after a little rain and I love the greens and purples of it.

I took the picture using Gorillacam. I played around with some filters in other apps but in the end was very happy with it as it was.

Number Sixty-Six: Fields of Yellow

Today's piece was created first in TypeDrawing where I used the snowflake font to draw this blue sky and field of yellow. Usually one of the first things I do when I download a new painting program is draw this particular scene. Once on a train trip across Canada when I was very, very young I saw enormous fields of something bright yellow and it's always stayed with me as one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I liked the result in TypeDrawing but wasn't hugely thrilled with the font so used an oil painting effect app called OilCanvas to change it up a bit.

OilCanvas is pretty good except the pictures it produces are fairly small, as you can see. It's a shame because the effort that goes into producing a work of art is a bit disproportionate as a result. There are four paintbrush sizes and you're supposed to start with the biggest and work your way down to the smallest, going over every pixel of the painting until you've re-created an oil painting effect. It's very cool in that, like Artist's Touch, you control the flow and movement of the strokes and what you do has a big effect on the end result. It's definitely not just a filter that does all the work for you!

I intentionally didn't use the smallest brushes over the entire thing for this picture, liking the chunky larger pieces of colour I got with the bigger ones in this case.

Number Sixty-Five: Happy Colours

Today's piece was created using Artist's Touch, an app I've only just started exploring. It's a bit similar to Corel's Paint It! Now in that it produces faux painting and drawing effects, but it differs in that it doesn't apply the effect while you sit and wait; you have to 'paint' the effect on yourself with your finger or stylus, thus affecting the position and direction of the brushstrokes depending on the settings (brush size, background, tool style, et cetera.) In that sense it's a lot more flexible than Corel's Paint It! Now.

As I've explained before I don't like using this kind of app for photos that turn out well. I prefer saving them for the ones that need help. This out-of-focus photo of some flowers belonging to my mother had an amazing colour palette that I wanted to make use of for iPhone wallpaper so I played with it in Artist's Touch. I used what I think is the pastels filter on it (they're pictures of brushes and drawing tools that are unlabeled) and kept the brush size very large. I loved the brightness of the colours and how the app carried them over into each other a bit and it now resides on my iPhone screens.

Number Sixty-Four: Gray Feathers

Today's piece was another 'pocket picture'; a mysterious photo I took accidentally. I decided to run it through Corel's Paint It! Now's Impressionist filter to see what happened and loved the feathery effect it gave the shades of gray.

Click to see it at full size to get the full effect!

Number Sixty-Three: Sitting Quietly

Today's art was drawn in Zen Brush; a nifty little app that mimics the use of an ink brush. I drew today's picture in less than ten seconds, just changing the size for the whiskers with the slider mid-draw. It was very satisfying to produce this and feel like I'd stayed true to the 'zen' idea.

The act of drawing with this app is also satisfying because the lines you draw really do act like paint on a brush, trailing off and deepening depending on how you move and your speed. I love it and I'll be experimenting a lot with it in the future!

Number Sixty-Two: A Handful Of Berries

I took this picture in October but never quite got around to using it then. My mom's raspberry bushes provided tons of berries right up until just a few weeks ago and well into October Essie and I were going into the backyard daily where she'd eat them by the handful. My handful. I'd pick them like this and she'd stick her face into my hand and hoover them up like a greedy bear.

I think I took this one when she was finally tired of eating berries one day and left me with these so I snapped a few shots with Gorillacam, then cropped this one in Snapseed. I didn't use any other filters on it because I didn't want to mess with the brightness and richness of the red.

As always click to see the picture at full size.