APPart – Creating Outstanding Art With Image Blender

In the following examples I recreated the process I used for ‘High Tea’ I layered a Juxtaposer creation over a street cafe image and used masking and blend modes create the scene. Please note I am working on my iPad, while the functions are the same the button placements are different.

I loaded the art image as the background image and the street scene photo as the foreground image. I went into ‘adjust’ and moved the street photo so it was composed how I wanted it, you can adjust the size of the top image and/or rotate it.

Then I went into the ‘mask’ function to mask out the street scene from over my character. When masking there are two brushes available; a soft and a hard brush. I zoom in and use the soft brush for delicate areas then use the hard brush for the outer areas. Some people do the opposite so work with it a few times either way and see what works best for you.

If you make a mistake in erasing you can undo the last step by holding your finger or stylus on the screen, an undo button will appear, or for fine control in areas you can select the pencil to un-erase sections.

You can adjust the opacity view of each layer when blending by taping the layers icon in the bottom corner and adjusting the sliders, this is really handy when erasing to make sure you have not missed a section.

Once I had masked the image I went into the blend modes selector. I won’t pretend to completely understand the blend modes, I had never worked with any sort of program or app that used them before Blender. I tried a few out until I was happy, I settled on multiply. The table required more masking so I went back into the mask function and zoomed in for fine control over the legs of the table.

The opacity slider is fantastic! Unlike juxtaposer that only layers solid images, Blender lets you adjust the opacity of the top image, allowing you can be as subtle or as bold as you wish. In my image ‘coming or going’, I saved the image from juxtaposer with just the central Melancholy figure, then went on and added the other Melancholy’s and saved that version to camera roll too. I then loaded both versions into Blender and used the opacity slider to ghost out the extra melancholy figures.

I adjusted the opacity of the blend on’ High Tea’ fading the street scene out and saved to camera roll ready for the next step.

You can also save to (compatible) other apps in Blender. In previous versions I would flatten my image by holding the screen for a few seconds until the ‘copy, switch, flatten’ menu pops up. By doing this it compresses both images into the edit you had completed. The image only appeared in the left hand (background) box, leaving the right hand (foreground) box empty. I did this so I could transfer the edit back to Blender for further adjustment. However after a recent update if you flatten the image the app won’t allow you to save unless you open a second image. This is a little frustrating so I have to save to camera roll and then save to another app. If I need to go back into Blender a new session needs to be open. I am hoping this is just a bug in the upgrade and it will be fixed next round.

© Mel Harrison – ‘High Tea’

I am moving my column to fortnightly over the (Australian) summer vacation, and as the next column falls just after the festive season I thought I would do something a little different. I am opening the floor to questions. Is there something in particular you want to know about my work? Have I done something you are not sure how to recreate? or want to know what app I used on a particular image? Something about me? Email your questions to [email protected] and I will select a set to answer for the next column.

© Mel Harrison – ‘Neptune’

© Mel Harrison – ‘Coming or Going’