Yellow in the Cactus Garden

“Silence is not always golden; sometimes it is yellow”

Find more Cactus Monday posts, at Teri's Painted Daisies.
For yellow posts see Drowsy Monkey at Mellow Yellow Monday.

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Cactus Monday - Downtown

Our recent trip to Downtown Tucson made me realize how little I know about the city's center. I'm learning that "The Old Pueblo," as Tucson is nicknamed, has many facets that are worth exploring. We did stumble upon some cactus and other plant forms on our quick trip, but we barely scratched the surface.

This is one of two matching metal basket towers on Scott Avenue at Broadway. It appears the bottom of the obelisk has information about the architecture of the area. Something to check out on on another visit.
The top looks like a Hohokam basket filled with prickly pears and some other plants.
A saguaro harvest is taking place on the lower portion of this wall treatment.
Notice the similar shapes of the basket tower and the Native American figure on the tiles.
A saguaro cactus echos the shapes of the archways in the superior court building.
A purple saguaro bus stop shelter:
This was my favorite bus stop:
At first I thought the big flower was a cactus blossom, but the trailing vines and leaves look like they belong to the rose family.
The flower's filaments are twisted steel rebar. I liked their shadows.
Another giant metal flowering plant sprouts out from the ground beside a sidewalk:
More plant forms on walls of buildings:
The artwork below is hard to see because of the busy reflection. The window has a wrought iron saguaro cactus with a bird and a human figure. It's across the street from the Chicago Store on Congress Street.
I'm kind of curious how the muscle man relates to the cactus here. Looks like they might be saying, "cheers!"

Happy Cactus Monday!

For more cactus posts, visit Teri at Teri's Painted Daisies.

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Desert Fiesta

Happy Cactus Monday!

In the desert, the last bloomers of the summer monsoon season are the barrel cacti. The most common flower color is orange, but they also bloom in yellow and red. With cacti decked out in these warm festive colors, it looks like the desert is celebrating the end of a hot summer.

barrel cacti glow
golden orange and red
monsoon sunset

For more Cactus Monday posts celebrating cacti and succulents, visit Teri's Painted Daisies.

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Cactus Monday - Chainfruit Sketch

"A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places."
~ Paul Gardner

Chainfruit sketch - with horizontal background gradient,
watercolor filter and craquelure texture added

Reference photo

Scanned pen sketch

Photoshop paint added

Diagonal gradient added

Here's my first cactus sketch attempt. I really want to get in the habit of sketching daily, but for some reason I avoid it. I managed to make one sketch from a photo and spent the rest of the week trying to figure out how to do a smooth gradient background in Photoshop CS2. For some reason, the gradient looks choppy or banded. I tried to smooth it out by blurring, adding noise and textures to it.

As I recall, when tried working with real watercolor paints years ago, I never quite mastered "step one" which is a graded wash. But maybe it's time to play around with wet watercolors again and see what happens. Perhaps getting a smooth gradient isn't all that important after all.

I like what Teri says in her Cactus Monday post today titled, Trial and Error:

"You never know until you try something.

So try something new today."

Happy Cactus Monday! Head on over to Teri's Painted Daisies for more cactus posts and art inspiration.

More photos of chainfruit cacti today on my Sabino Canyon Blog.

Photoshop Update: Stapelaid suggested adding more color points in a custom gradient to make it smoother, and it helps. :)

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Pixel Magic

Greetings and Happy Cactus Monday!

I've been playing around with this simple Photoshop trick. A single line of pixels is selected and then pulled using Ctrl+T. This technique works vertically as well as horizontally. The stretched sections can be moved, and the canvas enlarged, if desired. These are some of my experiments:

Red Bird Of Paradise

There is something about viewing altered images that gets creative juices flowing. Hopefully I've included enough cactus examples to provide color and design inspiration for cactus lovers as well as art and nature enthusiasts.

Budding Barrel Cactus

Prickly Pear Fruit

House Finches in Red and Orange

March Ocotillos

Purple Prickly Pear

Cactus Wren

Azurite and Malachite

Creosote Seeds

Sunset

I learned about this process from an article by Evad at Colourlovers.com. Click here for some stunning examples of Single Pixel Color Inspiration from Photos.

Visit Teri's Painted Daisies to see more Cactus Monday posts.

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Cactus Monday - Faux Oil Painting

Happy Cactus Monday :)

Welcome to Desert Colors! I started this new blog as a place to put my creative experiments and art related posts.

These are some of my recent experiments with oil painting in Photoshop. I followed this Photoshop Essentials tutorial. The tutorial shows how to set up the oil painting action so that it can instantly be applied to a photo without having to paint individual brushstrokes. I tried it out on many photos, with mixed results, but I do like the glass-like distortion.

The colors are quite saturated on this first one exaggerating the late afternoon glow of the setting sun on the prickly pear pads. Click picture for closer view.
I kept the colors more natural on the next two images.

I had the most fun with this photo of an old prickly pear cactus.

I rotated the canvas and cropped in for an abstract effect, before doing the oil painting action.

Then, I inverted the colors and cropped closer. I like this one the best, but the picture is small now and it won't enlarge.

Thanks for stopping by. For more Cactus Monday posts, visit Teri's Painted Daisies.

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