Creating a Rainbow Peony Kaleidoscope

Every now and then I take my drawing tablet and just start to 'fiddle' about with brushes, colors, trying different settings as backgrounds. ArtRage is my go-to software in these cases.
Today I felt like doing just that. Starting with nothing, not wanting to create anything.
Sometimes this yields an artful creation that is both beautiful and inspiring. More pleasing than anything I can create with a clear intent behind it.
So today that is what happened. This creation came to life:

"Everything is okay"

Would you like to join me on a little walk along the path of creation?

Playing around with brushes and pallet knives in ArtRage gave me this. I decided I liked the way it looked, didn't delete it. It felt right in some way.

So I added another layer.
With a stencil an water color brush.

Still liked it...

so yet another layer was added.

This is where I noticed I no longer wanted to just "fiddle a bit, then delete swiftly".





I got the feeling of keeping it. Using it as a background for a gorgeous picture of a flower. Because that's what I love to do, you see.

So I exported the digital painting to Photoshop. Went to my file of pictures I took of a beautiful bouquet of peonies.

"So what if I place that one on top of this painted layer?" I asked myself.

Well, the peony and the background immediately fell in love with each other :-) 

Some experimentation with the blend mode of the layers, tweaking the saturation finally yielded this creation. 

It is like being witness to a small wonder, this slow, intuitive process of creation, when at some point everything falls into place. It amazes me every single time.

One thing I love as much as working with flower pictures, is turning creations into what I call: kaleidoscope creations. You can imagine how that works, don't you? Duplicate and flip three times:

"Everything is okay" 

Like the peony, I fell in love with this result. It sort of heals my creative soul, that felt rather ragged today.

So now the printed version sits on my desk, next to my laptop. Looking at it I know I will discover new little details every time I glance at it. Giving me tiny bits of healing for a while longer, which I welcome with all my heart.

I hope that looking at it will bring you some kind of good feeling or even some healing of any kind too.  

Love,

Maureen

PS: more info on ArtRage software can be found here