My “Pencil” Submission Explained

One of my favorite submissions for the 25th round of the Photography Scavenger Hunt was for the word Pencil. My final image is shown below, but I didn’t actually draw this. I used several Topaz plugins, which I’ll detail for you after the final image.

Final Pencil Image

Here is the image that I started with, which is a simple macro shot with the pencil balanced on the Hot Wheels car.

Initial Photograph

The first thing I did was clean up the image in Lightroom. Then I sent it to Topaz’s Glow plugin, where I used the liquid lines filter to make the car look more smooth and give it a little pop. I masked out the pencil, so it would always look real. Here’s that image

Second Edited Image

Next, I used Topaz Texture plugin to give the whole car a sketched look. I masked out the pencil again.

Third Image with the Sketched look applied

After that, I sent the image back to Topaz’s Texture plugin and used the black and white sketch filter on just part of the image and masked out the parts I wanted to keep. That brings us back to the final image, which I submitted.

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Poetry and the Midjourney AI

I have been testing out the Midjourney AI for a while now and have loved exploring what it can create from a simple prompt. You can see my creations and prompts on Instagram at @artbywadeai . Recently, I tried feeding the AI two of my poems and was very impressed with the results. The first poem I gave the AI was my Sunshine Reaching one. Go take a look and then check out these great images. The prompt I used for the Midjourney AI was the text of the poem with the parameters --chaos 25 --ar 3:2 appended at the end as shown below: With rays of warmth, he embraces her soul. Arms, iron strong, surround their love. Sunshine reaching, fills the room. With feathered whispers, they embrace the day. --chaos 25 --ar 3:2 Here are the first images returned. From these, I choose the second and last to render as full size images or upscale. Here are those results. After this experiment, I gave the AI my Strength poem and was very pleased with those results. Here is the full prompt ...

Dreaming of the Weekend

I have been trying to improve my images by making them have a little bit of fantasy in them. I know we all like to escape from time to time. Here is my latest creation. Let me know what you think. Prints: https://wade-brooks.pixels.com/featured/dreaming-of-the-weekend-wade-brooks.html

My Art is Showing at the Renaissance Center!

Everyone, I have three images showing this month at the Renaissance Center in Wake Forest NC, below is a link. The show runs from March 7 to April 2. You can purchase my prints online at: https://wade-brooks.pixels.com/collections/recent Gallery Info here: https://www.wakeforestrencen.org/event/march-art-exhibit-reception-wake-forest-camera-club Cheers, Wade

Art by Wade

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