Week 12: Bike Paint Brushes

            I made this painting out of various photos that I took of different bike parts that I turned into paintbrushes. First, I went to Target and took ten pictures of various parts of a bike such as: pedals, handle bars, bike gears, a bell, a bike stand, wheels, a helmet, reflectors, a seat, and an air. Then I opened each photo into a Photoshop document and changed the background layer to layer 0. I deleted the pixels that I didn’t need by using the polygon lasso tool, rectangular and circular tools, and also the eraser. When I was done with the deleting the extra pixels, I duplicated the layer into a new document. These documents consisted of 2500 by 2500 pixels, 300 DPI, and gray scale. Then I selected all and went to edit and hit the define paint brush. When I did this to all nine photos, I then made my own paintbrush for the wheel of the bike. I used the rectangular and circular tool to make a bike wheel. I put each individual piece of the wheel on its own layer and then combined them all into one group. I selected the entire bike wheel and defined it into a paintbrush. Next, I opened a new document on U.S. paper that was 11 x 8.5 on RGB. I started on my first layer using one color and only one paintbrush. This painting is using the neighboring colors of pink and purple, but with a wide variety of different tones between these two colors. Some layers varied between light and dark and also being completely covered to only having one stamp. When I was done with all ten layers, I arranged the different layers until I was satisfied with these two paintings. I arranged these paintings this way so that people could see the different bike parts that I used. I am controlling the viewers eye by contrasting each part so that they stick out more.  These are two paintings that I made out of my own paintbrushes by using various parts of bikes. This means you can express an idea in this case a bike without using an actual bicycle. By using different parts helps get the idea that this painting is representing bicycles. I’m trying to say that by expressing a symbol by using various parts from the item can also get the point across.