Temple of Fire - Click to embiggen
Travel to the City of Brass with me, where I managed to capture some nice shots before the clockwork guardians hauled me before the Hive Queen. Full process below the art.
Previous Installments in this series
Every piece of art in this post started as this macro photography of water ripples (below left) ran through the Deep Dream Generator with this style image (below right - I do not own the style image, low-res version presented here as fair use in describing my process):
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Temple of Fire - Details
City of Brass
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Hive Queen of the Citadel
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I made the above using the same pyramid base image I used for the Pyramid of the Goddess in the last post in the series. This time I ran it through the Deep Dream Generator with a metal engraving as style image (pyramid abstraction base image below left, metal engraving style image below right - I do not own the style image, low-res version presented here as fair use in describing my process):
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The raw output from the Deep Dream Generator:
Metal Dream Pyramid Click to embiggen
I did something a little different this time, I took the original pyramid abstraction and adjusted the levels and contrast to make it a higher contrast, black and white image. Then I selected all the white space using the Select Color Range command in PhotoShop (with maximum fuzziness) and deleted the white space, leaving me with just a network of black lines. This I used to overlay the metal dream pyramid. Here is just the black line layer - toggle Night Mode to get the full effect as this is a transparency (I used an inner stroke effect to make sure that any shapes in this layer were solid black all the way through, and the emboss effect to make them look more 3d and blobby). You can see that I used a layer mask to partially obscure this layer in places to allow more of the metal pyramid to show through :
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The raw output from the dream generator of the metal pyramid was a little washed out in places, so I duplicated the metal pyramid layer and increased the contrast, tweaked the levels to make a broader range dark, and tweaked the colors to get deeper and darker reds and golds. I covered this entire layer with a mask and then only exposed small sections of it where the original deep dream metal pyramid was washed out. Here is just the second, darker pyramid layer so you can see what I am talking about (I also followed some of the black goo lines around on this layer to give them some depth behind them):
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Combining the black lines layer, the darker pyramid layer and the original deep dream output gave me the Temple of Fire post cover image. Mirroring that gave me the City of Brass. I created the Hive Queen by hiding sections of the original image to highlight an insectoid face. I cut, resized and rotated sections of the original image to construct eye sockets.
Bonus Image: Temple of the Moon
After I sweet talked my way out of my audience with the queen, I took a brief detour on the return trip to check out the Temple of the Moon!
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