Julio PDN Pics

It's getting harder to get images out with everything going on at home. I'm trying to get some done, but I'm backed up on requests and personal projects that I'm doing what I can for now. I made this as a therapeutic piece since I've had a lot going on, and I call it Energy Wisps. Nothing crazy here aside from the usual Gaussian Blur, Radial Blur, Dents, and Polar Inversion. I did add some Frosted Glass and Crystalize effects in there to add a bit more texture on the bottom left. I also used Additive, Glow, and Negation layer blend modes to blend it together. This was a photo manipulation of the NCIS Soundtrack artwork found here . Sorry for the short post but I'll see you here next time.

 A few months ago I went back to my hometown for a visit, and it was a fun time. I even got to take my family to a park full of sandstone and it was fun watching my kids explore a bit. The patterns and color of some of the stone down there is always mesmerizing, and it's just a lovely sight to see. I know I made an abstract in the past of sandstone and the patterns that it has, but I took a different approach to this one. Here I give you Sandstone Desert. I started with the Gran Canaria Gem as my stock image, and went to town with it. After coming round the mountain and getting back home, I got to work manipulating it with Radial Blur. On the duplicate of the gem, I blended it with Color Burn to give it a vibrant and darker color, and did a Radial blur from a different corner. I then merged them down and did another radial blur from a different angle to give it a smooth, yet interesting texture. I then did a Polar Inversion with Gaussian Blur to blur out the inversion part. I then ...

 Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2021 has been treating everyone better than 2020 ended up being. If not, I'm sure peace will come soon to everyone, at least we hope. I decided to start this new year with a throwback to 2013. I made this shortly after coming back from Spain, but I don't think I ever posted this one. While I was in Spain, I went to the Canary Islands for about 4 months. While I was there, there were stunning views of the ocean and the island from some local beaches. I was fortunate to capture some of that beauty on my camera, as you can see below. When I got back home, it took a while to get into the groove of things since it took some adjustment to regular life in the USA. I made a few different images, and I decided to then revisit a tutorial I had done with Heatstroke a while ago to make a gem. If you wanted to give it a try, you can find that tutorial on the Paint.NET Forums here . I chose the stock photo above and created the image you see below called Gran...

It is now December, and another crazy year has gone by. Not sure what to make of 2020, hard, stressful, and many other things. Hopefully this coming year is better for us in the long run. So I made several fractals a while ago, and decided to recently use one for this image. I realized that I made the fractals tiny (because I still don't know how to use Apophysis 7X), so I had to work with expanding them further. Even then, I mostly kept them small in the image as little swirls, but that makes it a bit more unique to what I've done in the past. So here I give you Echos of the Deep. I first opened the PNG of the fractal and made it about 2.5 times bigger on the top left corner. I then duplicated it, and moved it to two other locations on the canvas, to add more color. I then proceeded to manipulate each layer with Radial Blur. I then merged them all down, duplicated the layer, did Radial Blur a couple of times, as well as Dents and blended the layer with Color Dodge. I then crea...

Not sure what you are thinking about with a title like this, but it's not me changing anything up, nor other things like that. I had some help with the title of this one, and the glow of it had my wife thinking about new life due to the glow. I also thought it was interesting since this image is literally a manipulation of Nature's Rage and Molten Echos, so here is New Life. Literally took both images, did Radial Blur on both of them, and set the layer blend mode of Molten Echos to Negation. That's literally it, and it looks completely different from both of the images separately. Needed some time to just sit and not do too much, so two manipulations in two months. Hopefully I have something new up soon for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

Here I am with another image for you. This is actually a manipulation of Lifeforce, so it's not really new per say, but different enough to be worthy of being on the blog. I also thought it looked more chaotic than Lifeforce, hence the title of this image, Nature's Rage. Kind of a perfect title for this COVID-19 pandemic that has hit us hard. Some Radial Blur as well as Dents and Gaussian Blur are the foundation for the image, and Overlay for the layer blend modes. I'm running low on ideas here, but hopefully I get some ideas here soon for brand new images for you guys. Not too bad for just throwing it together though, right? See you here again soon.

I have a slightly unusual post, but hopefully things will make sense after you read this. So this image I attempted to follow the tutorial that Heatstroke sent me a while ago to make the Elemental Power of Stone image on the most up to date version of Paint.NET, but the attempt failed. So I decided I would try to manipulate the Elemental Power of Stone image instead. Hence you see that the same exact crystal structure is in the middle, but it looks smoother than I would have liked. It's also a bit brighter than I wanted it, but I'll make another attempt. Here is the image called Stone's furnace. I have Radial Blur and Zoom Blur along with different layer blend modes to make the colors come out. Hopefully this image is worthy of this blog and that you all enjoyed it. I'll bet by now you are wondering why I have two images for this, and that is because I made this for dual monitors which is a first time for me. These are for if you don't have dual monitors and...

I was thinking of what I could do for another image since I was running out of fresh ideas, and I thought, why not manipulate an image that I already created to create something new. This image is a manipulation of The Rush . It's a good image by itself, and the colors are nice and all, but I wanted to make it better. I believe I succeeded with the new image from an old one that I call Aurora. Mainly used Radial Blur to really get it smooth and then got Polar Inversion to get it to have that look of it coming at you from afar. I then did another polar inversion to get the different textures into the rest of the canvas and added some subtle dents. I then played with layer blend modes and when I got a color scheme that I liked, I thought it was good to go. Enjoy this art my friends. It is nearly the end of the year, and I have been working hard to bring you at least two images every month, and I can honestly say it has been awesome! It was hard since I hardly have time, but I...

This I made a while ago (like about a year ago), and I decided to post it on here just for kicks. I did another photo manipulation here, with Orange Energy as the base, and I wanted to share this with you close to Halloween. Also it has some fall colors in there, so I feel it is ideal for this time of year. Here's the old image called Orange Energy. This one I was experimenting with Kaleidoscope and a few other effects that I don't remember. Here is Candy Corn Dreams. Radial Blur Deluxe, Polar Inversion, and Splinter blur. I then added two little orange dents and filled in some dark areas. Hopefully you enjoy these images and enjoy your Halloween in a couple days. Get lots of candy, and then eat some Candy Corn.

So about a month ago, I posted an image called Smelling Roses. When I was making it, I ran into a whole different color scheme when I adjusted a layer's blend mode. Since then, I wanted to revisit it and make something with that different color scheme, and so here it is, after about a month I would like to show you the different colors that came out of changing one layer. This image is called Marbled Aurora. Same effects as Smelling Roses, but a few extra bits were added to fill in some dark spots using Dents, Frosted Glass, and Gaussian Blur. Hope you enjoy this image, and I'll see you here again soon.

Hey everyone and happy Throw Back Thursday! This is my 100th post on this blog, which is a huge milestone for me. I almost want to go out and celebrate this milestone and eat some ice cream or something, but we’ll see what happens. Anyway, I have decided that I would make this a special post and show you a bit of my accomplishments throughout the years. I have a compilation of a few of my favorite images (except the first one) I've made over the years to show how much I’ve grown and improved down below. Divided (Aug. '09) Cool Fire (Dec. '09) Underwater Fire (Mar. '10) Fire Jolt (Sept. '10) Jewel (Oct. '10) Ice Inversion (Nov. '10) Mystic Light (Feb. '11) Left Behind (Mar. '11) The Rush (Apr. '11) Mountain Horizon (Apr. '11) Blue Energy Stream (May '13) Portal Back Home (Jul. '14) Colors of Fall (Nov. '15) Elemental Power of Fire (Jan. '16...

Remember Divided from two posts ago? Here is the manipulation of that image that you have been waiting for. I call it Horizon Lights, since it looks like some of the light in the horizon at sunrise/sunset. Lots of Radial Blur Deluxe, Dents, Splinter, and a lot of layer blend modes in effect. I even flattened the image, copied it, and manipulated it even more to give you the result below. The layer blend modes were hard to get right since I would look at one blend mode, and love it! Then I would look at another one, and love it too!! It was a tough choice to have it looking how it is, but I'm happy with it. I hope you all enjoyed this installment of My PDN Pictures and I hope to see you here again very soon.

The title is something that I haven't really done here, which is a title that isn't the title of the image at all. Don't worry, I'll go on to my old ways here in the next post, unless you guys like the interesting titles. We shall see what happens. So I was thinking of what to do for a new image, and I thought, why not resurrect my very first image that I made on Paint.NET, which I called Divided. Now, this image is the worst image I have on here, at least one of my worst, since it was when I first started and didn't know what I was doing. I have since gotten better as you can see, and am wanting to show what I can do. Anyhow, I wanted to do something with this image so that I can compare them side by side, and show myself how far I've come in 9 years or so. To give you perspective, here is my first image called Divided. Not the best, lots of dark areas, and not many effects. I was a senior in High School since it was created back in September of 2009. So...

Here is yet another image for your enjoyment. February has come and gone, and with March rolling in, we have warmer weather to look forward to. I started with the desktop background of my computer, which is of Lake Powell pictured below. I then started manipulating the photo with the new style that I picked up a few months ago and came out with a nice rose looking image. I thought it would be fitting with spring coming around the corner, to have an image depicting a type of flower. So, although this wasn't the outcome I was thinking of getting with this image, I left it how it was. It took some effects like Radial Blur Deluxe, Splinter, and some of my classic favorites like Dents and Glass Blocks to come out with the image you see below. I hope everyone is as excited about spring as I am. I'm done with the cold weather and hope that it doesn't last too much longer. Summer will be even better for me since I love the heat. Anyway, have a wonderful day everyone and...

This image uses the same method I used to make Melting Furnace which is take a stock photo and manipulate it like crazy to result in a new image. This image I used Mystic Colors as the stock shown below. I used a lot of Dents, Polar Inversion, and a lot of layer properties to make it look how I wanted it to. The nice purple and blue shine that it has makes me think of sound waves, but you can't just make it sound waves, not the best name. Hence the name that was officially given being Echo. I hope you enjoy and I'll have something else up here soon. Enjoy my older works in the meantime and see how far I've come.On that thought, if you are thinking of trying something new and aren't sure if you will be successful, just try it. You will never know until you try. Take a look at my works, the first year was horrid in comparison to now and that's all that matters in life. If you've picked something up that you don't know if you can continue, again don...

As school continues its toll, my brain (and quite possibly everyone else's) has taken a slight beating due to the amount of work and school work. Also not having internet and spending over 12 hours on the school campus is also tiring. Hence I wanted to make a flaming type of image that sort of depicted the state of my mind. I almost feel like my mind is melting in this furnace called my head, but we shall see how the rest of the semester goes. Anyway, the creation of this image was a bit different than what usually takes place. I didn't start with any shapes, lines, or scribbles, basically I didn't make this from scratch. Either that or you could say that it took 7 years to make this image. I used as a stock photo, an older image of mine called Glass Fire Explosion and distorted the crap out of it. Here is the original image. So after distorting with some of my favorite distortions, namely Radial Blur Deluxe, Frosted Glass, Dents, to name a few, and did a few layer b...

So, I've been seeing on my Facebook feed these different lightsaber building companies coming out with cool looking lightsabers. Not being able to afford one, I dug around and found one that I got at least 7 to 8 years ago, which came in a kit to "build your own lightsaber." It's nothing too fancy, but it still looks pretty cool. So since I have this, and I learned a super easy way to add "lightsaber effects" to any picture taken, I decided I would do just that with a lightsaber toy. Be warned, this is really easy, but the hard part is getting the saber part lined up. Now, what I used is a scripture marker that I got a while ago for the effects which is pictured below. A colored pencil with the retractable lead will work just as well. Now I'm sure you're thinking, how will that do anything with my picture??? Don't you just color with it? Yes, or so you thought until now. If you take out a considerable amount of lead, then you have somet...

As you can see, I left my blog again, but not quite for a month this time. From the title you can tell that this is going to be a portal kind of picture and it sort of is. I decided instead of doing an abstract from scratch, to do a photo manipulation and this is the outcome. The photo is from my hometown called St. George, Utah so hence the title Portal Back Home. I did a lot of manipulation, the main one that didn't change too much of it is Radial Blur Delux and that's what gave it that portal look in the center. I then added dents and some colors to finish it up. That's all I've got for now, but pretty soon I'll post a bit more. I've actually got quite a few that I haven't posted so keep an eye out these next few days.