This morning I am just going to share a few formulas from a series of photos I did recently. This is pretty much a test post, posting from the WordPress app on my iPad.
As always, if you have any questions about how to use Mextures or formulas, feel free to comment, or contact me by email or on social media.
Formula Name: Teal
Formula Code: ZHUHLGH
Formula Name: Teal V.2
Formula Code: BECQIYU
Formula Name: Teal V.3
Formula Code: VJTYQZF
Welcome to the very first Mextures Artist Feature! Partly because she agreed to be a guinnea pig for this project, and mostly because her art is just awesome, this first Mextures artist feature brings you an artist who has been a huge inspiration and encouragement to me, both in art and in life: Sarah (@boco_blondie).
Based in Boulder, CO, and some of the most beautiful scenery in the US, Sarah (like many of us on Instagram) started out sharing random blips of life and her surroundings that she’d shot and edited with her phone. It was a sort of a therapeutic, relaxing thing to do that helped her to express her creative spirit. Over time, she has grown artistically and, like me, as a person, thanks to all the friends and connections that have been made through Instagram.
Her Mextures edits of both her own images and collaboration pieces are always received with high acclaim and excitement, and her signature style of deep colors with faded highlights and almost dreamy tones always inspire me to embrace both the light and the darkness of my own images and my own existence. Sarah’s work is all about balance and self-expression, even when she shares no words or explanations in the captions, and she has expanded her (and our) Instagram and Mextures experience with the founding of her own hubs and mini-communities.
Sarah is the founder of @shotzdelight, @cloudzdelight, @flowerzdelight, and @mexturezdelight – a grouping of feature accounts for the subjects respective to their names. @Shotzdelight features “delightful artists daily,” all manner of subjects, styles and locations around the world. As a nature lover and a lover of all things “nature photography,” Sarah has expanded the @shotzdelight hub to include @cloudzdelight and @flowerzdelight – hubs that focus on the beauty and wonder of nature and feature some brilliant work showcasing the beauty you can see in the world if you just slow down and pay attention. And, of course, there is the @mexturezdelight hub – my personal favorite of her family of hubs – which is geared specifically toward featuring the amazing and beautiful creations that you guys share from the Mextures app.
Below is a listing of hubs/tags, some of the Mextures formulas Sarah has shared, and a sample of her amazing and inspiring gallery. Be sure to check out Sarah’s Instagram gallery, and visit her feature accounts to explore and find some amazing art and artists that will no doubt encourage and inspire you in your own photography journey, and in your life. If you share images that fall into those categories, be sure to tag them so that Sarah and her crew can explore and be inspired by you and your work, as well! I know they will all be excited to see and share in what you’re doing on Instgram.
@shotzdelight | tag #shotzdelight
@cloudzdelight | tag #cloudzdelight
@flowerzdelight | tag #flowerzdelight
@mexturezdelight | tag #mexturezdelight
@boco_blondie™ #1 – VGMGQLK
@boco_blondie™ #2 – RDYLXZU
@boco_blondie™ #3 – WIQFSZN
East Rock @boco_blondie™ – KZZVDEV
Whiteout @boco_blondie™ – FUICVKR
MexturezDelight @boco_blondie™ – NTTMQJH
**For this first, very special feature, I want to close with a special note:
My dear Sarah, thank you so much for agreeing to help me jumpstart this Mextures blogging adventure with your amazing art. Thank you for supporting my random fancies and the twists and turns of my journey, and for inspiring and encouraging myself and others – not only through your words and art but also by your actions in your own life – to never give up and to never stop trying. Thank you for all that you give of yourself to the communities that we all love on Instagram, and to us personally. You do, and you give, more than you could possibly know. Your presence makes our worlds brighter and our Instagram feeds more beautiful. In short, you rock, and I am so very excited to share your work and your awesomeness with readers here. Wishing you so much success, happiness, and everything you have offered to us all, always…
~C
Mextures. It’s a fabulous tool and it’s a fabulous toy – a very verstaile image editing app for iPhone and iPad. If you search the hashtags related to Mextures on Instagram, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of images – all manner of styles and all sorts of subjects that have been edited (or even created) from Mextures alone or by combining Mextures with any number of other awesome editing apps.
Behind the apps and behind the art, there are people – really cool, really talented, really amazing people. I’ve gotten to know some of them through Instagram and different hubs there, and each day it spiderwebs out and I am either shown or I find more amazing art and artists. So often, they blow my mind. From them I learn different styles and techniques to play with. Formulas are shared and tweaked between us. My creativity is pushed and grows, and my sanity is kept in line.
I talk about this (Mextures and how it and the community surrounding it inspire and encourage me) a lot in different posts, and it’s why I started sharing Mextures formulas and blogs here in the first place. The Mextures community on Instagram grows and grows, but it’s hard to lay it out and format it in single posts there because of limits on posts lengths, so I brought it here so that I could share how-to’s and more expressive posts about it. That, however, has been limited to my own forumlas and self-expressions, and I am dissatisfied with that. I want to make it more. I want to make it bigger. I want to make it about the people in that community who rock my world so much and so often.
And that’s what Mextures Artist Features will be all about. I am going to be sharing posts all about these artists and their work, sometimes interviewing them and sometimes just throwing some stuff that I think is just amazingly awesome at you. I have written and scheduled a few of these posts already and am just waiting for the artists to OK them. The first post is scheculed to go live tomorrow morning, and it’ll be a sort of “practice” and “example” type post featuring some of my favorite pieces and formulas from my own gallery (a sort of random take on the “top 10” I was doing before, this time focussing on the formulas themselves and not just the images).
I hope you’ll enjoy these very different posts as much as I enjoy these artsits and their art, and as much as I enjoy creating the posts. This is all just part of my hobby, and I’m not sure that it’ll always be a defined, cut and dry type layout or post. I’m not sure how regular it will be, or how often I will post, based on how insane my life is at random times. It’ll be what it is, but what I hope it will always be is fun.
If you are interested in being a part of this, guest posting or suggesting art/artists, or even seeing your own work and formulas featured here if you work with Mextures, please feel free to contact me here or via Instagram @catacosmic. The bigger the community the better, I say. The more people, the more art, the more styles, the more subjects, then the more creativity and inspiration.
Wishing you a very happy Sunday and a very good week…
~C
The long awaited Mextures formula postings begin with this post. I often share (try always to, if I create one) a Mextures formula with my work on Instagram or Facebook but there were a lot of messages coming in and comments randomly on my posts asking me to compile them. I’m not sure how I’m going to do that, as far as organization, but we will start here with some of the more recent formulas and go from there. Perhaps later I can group them into two or three clumps and do a page where I share, like black and white formulas, super textured formulas, simple formulas, and so forth…but, for now, we’ll just do these recent ones:
Formula Name: Winter Evening
Formula Code: CBFYHAP
Formula Name: Winter Woods
Formula Code: IPTMVAL
Formula Name: Lost in Translation
Formula Code: PJIGBKN
Formula Name: Freedom
Formula Code: VMUIHIB
Formula Name: Stagnation
Formula Code: XFBXRYI
Formula Name: Grungy Spring
Formula Code: LZIUSQJ
Formula Name: Varley Variation
Formula Code: UKEDTCI
Formula Name: Solitude in Spring
Formula Code: ZFTNUKC
Formula Name: Keats
Formula Code: MDYJZCN
I hope you enjoy these formulas – remember that blend modes of layers and layers themselves may require tweaking depending on the light/style/tone of your image and they will not necessarily look exactly the same on your images as they do in the provided versions.
If you have any questions about Mextures or using formulas, feel free to ask them in comments or via e-mail or social media/messaging.
I’ve become obsessed with succulents as of late, as well as pastel-ish, faded VSCO looks, so here’s this succulent photo I played with in VSCO and decided to save earlier in the week:
And, here are the rest of the Unsplash samples edited using this preset:
If you like/use VSCO I hope you’ll enjoy this preset. Have a beautiful weekend, friends.
This edit is inspired by Jesse Martineau’s love of mountains. I love mountains, too… Mountains again, Gandalf!
It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen snow covered mountains so I’ve taken a cue from one of my favorite editing artists @boco_blondie and chosen this fabulous image from the Unsplash free-use gallery. At the time of this posting, the Unsplash gallery search was unavailable. I will update this post with the OP info as soon as possible.
The only edits I did with this image were in VSCO, and it is a very simple preset. I just loved the result so I thought I’d share. Lately I am really into faded images and images with a sort of rustic feel to them. I hope you enjoy this one. Due to how dark this image was to begin with, this preset will likely be a lot lighter of an effect on a lighter image, so you may need to fade more, skip bumping shadows or decrease them to get a darker fade on a lighter image. And, of course, there plenty of other tools in VSCO to help you achieve a darker look with a lighter image – my suggestions are just where I would begin.
All the love,
C.
catacosmosis 