Greek Holidays and other Speccy Art

[Joefish]

Thought I'd add one of those arty-farty threads myself, as I've just uploaded a new pic.
I don't know how those other lot do it though. This has taken me months...


ZXArt

I like trying to do realistic pictures. These are from my own holiday photographs. I've been trying too hard with previous images to get them exactly right and almost pixel-aligned with the original. Inspired by some of the art recently posted, I took a few more liberties with this one, shaping the buildings around what I can do with attributes, and the rest of it according to what I can represent with the contrasting colours.

This is the Holy Monastery of Panagia Vlacherna, Corfu. It's the famous tiny monastery on the tip of the Kanoni Peninsula, south of the capital town of Corfu, Greece. In the background the hills are the very edge of Greece, bordering Albania. It's where James Bond meets Melina Havelock in 'For Your Eyes Only' and close to Pontikonisi ('Mouse Island'), where the young naturalist Gerald Durrell and his sister Margo went swimming and sunbathing in the 1930s.

[Joefish]

This is another one. I like the detail of the buildings, but I can see now the rocky descending cliff, and the ridge in the background, should be completely re-done. The style there is just a bit cheap.

Now I know I could have done the domes in blue and the sky in cyan, so why invert it? Well, it's the feeling of standing there. It's so warm, and the blue of the sky is properly dazzling, yet that never comes across in a picture, even HDR, without fading out the foreground. Blue is so often just used as either the sea, or a substitute for black in Speccy images to hide a bit of colour clash, but when I tried a solid blue sky I felt it just hit me with the intensity of the colour the same way you can close your eyes in Greece and feel the warmth surrounding you.



I also love that you can go to Google Maps and pinpoint exactly where some of my pictures are in the world...
https://goo.gl/maps/i67T38QMuQWTECum9

[Grongy]

Pretty good stuff!

[Joefish]

You can see the others at ZXArt, but here's a couple more. This was a simpler one with just big blocks of shading. This is from the island of Santorini, but not the usual tourist places. There's a small town called Emporio that looks just like a high street of shops and a couple of cafés if you pass through it, but behind it is this fantastic old town of narrow passageways and whitewashed cubed houses where you can hear people in the houses talking, cutlery clinking, all around you, yet the narrow alleyways are all empty of people. And best of all, no tourists. The streets are just a maze leading up to a tall church and a few domed chapels around it at the top of a hill. Again, part of the maze of streets means I'm looking up at this dome, but have no idea where you'd actually enter the building.

[Joefish]

And last, this one was a bit of a cheat. There's a gorgeous restaurant called 'En Plo' right on the end of an aritficial peninsula behind the main governor's palace in the capital town of Corfu. You can sit and watch the sunset, and the boats coming and going from the port, cutting past in a channel between the main island and the offshore island of Vidos - a former prison and later orphanage, now a Scout camping destination.

This was from a digital photo I took. I enhanced the contrast of the image, lowered the resolution and ran an 'edge enhance' filter over it, before reducing the number of colours. Still a pretty poor representation, so then went over the boat in detail, pixel by pixel, tidying it up, shifting bits to line up with attributes, etc. The background is completely repainted with some basic stippling - that's Vidos island in the foreground, and the Greek/Albanian mountains beyond. And the water ripples are pretty much as they came off the tweaked photo. Not sure why I left the sea as blue lines and mostly white when it's so late in the day, but it just seems to work.

[Joefish]

Pretty good stuff!

Coming from someone who posts so many amazing pictures, that's quite high praise!

[helpcomputer0]

Great job! The domes and the ship in particular look difficult but came out nice.

[R-Tape]

This was from a digital photo I took. I enhanced the contrast of the image, lowered the resolution and ran an 'edge enhance' filter over it, before reducing the number of colours. Still a pretty poor representation, so then went over the boat in detail, pixel by pixel, tidying it up, shifting bits to line up with attributes, etc.

That's worked pretty well. Cleaning up a digitised image takes a lot of patience - whenever I try it it looks a right shambles.

It just needs a beeper rendition of Zorba playing and you've got a hellenic version of Booty.