Photo Blends 1: Collared Dove and Flowers

I’ve been continuing to play with GIMP, the open source photo editing software, to blend photos and create new digital art.

Usually, I create 7-10 iterations out of 2 photos and see where I end up. In August 2020, I shared 14 iterations from 1 photo of a dahlia in a post called The Arty Dahlia.

When I make these photo blends, which is my term for them, I never know where I will end up. One of the iterations mid-stream will be absolute dog puke, something I’d like to pretend never happened, but without that particular iteration, I would never have made it to an iteration I really like.

Here are two photos I blended in October/November 2020.**

Here are some of the results of the photo blending (my favorites, naturally!):

Below is my second favorite in the series.

Here is my favorite of the series.

** I have to get better at attaching a new date to my photo blends. GIMP starts with the date the original photo was taken and I alter the name based on what I’ve done in GIMP, but I always forget to change the date in order to let me know when I created the photo blends. In this case, I know that I took the collared dove photo on October 23, 2020, so I couldn’t have made the blends until after that date.

I also think I need to commit to putting watermarks on these. I didn’t think to do it when I started creating photo blends because I was just doing them for fun, but they are distinctive works made using photos I took, so I ought to do more than caption them.

Do you have a favorite in this series?