Tag: photography

  • Mextures Artist Features Introduction

    Mextures Artist Features Introduction

    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

  • Mextures Formulas #1

    Mextures Formulas #1

    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:

     

    IMG_9932

    Formula Name: Winter Evening

    Formula Code: CBFYHAP

     

     

    IMG_9933

    Formula Name: Winter Woods

    Formula Code: IPTMVAL

     

     

    IMG_9935

    Formula Name: Lost in Translation

    Formula Code: PJIGBKN

     

     

    IMG_9938

    Formula Name: Freedom

    Formula Code: VMUIHIB

     

     

    IMG_9940

    Formula Name: Stagnation

    Formula Code: XFBXRYI

     

     

    IMG_9936

    Formula Name: Grungy Spring

    Formula Code: LZIUSQJ

     

     

    IMG_9934

    Formula Name: Varley Variation

    Formula Code: UKEDTCI

     

     

    IMG_9937

    Formula Name: Solitude in Spring

    Formula Code: ZFTNUKC

     

     

    IMG_9939

    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.

  • VSCO Spring-y Preset

    VSCO Spring-y Preset

    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.

  • VSCO Preset: Mountain Blues

    VSCO Preset: Mountain Blues

    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.