Digital RMX - Exploring Digital Media

A while ago I had the idea of utilizing digital media for remixing existing artwork, much the same way as digital music producers create entirely new compositions using elements of existing songs. I wrote to some of my friends and favorite artists to ask if I could use their paintings to try the idea. Many of them said yes and sent me high resolution versions of their paintings.

This week I finally had some time to play around with the idea, and I decided to start by remixing a beautiful painting by the very talented visionary artist Amanda Sage titled Orphic Awakening.

Orphic Awakening by Amanda Sage

This painting is very multi-layered and has many elements that exist over different dimensions of the artwork so it was a little bit difficult to cleanly isolate parts of the painting that I could remix. I decided to instead think about what parts of the paintings could make a good repetitive pattern or texture that I could use in the creation of a new image.

I started by cutting out parts of the image in Adobe Photoshop and then using selective tools in Corel Painter to create a number of usable patterns and textures. These are the new tools I created from Amanda's painting. 

I decided on a simple composition of a profile of a female face just to play around with the new tools I created and to explore their potential. I worked on this image for about 5 hours in Corel Painter 12. I wouldn't consider this a finished artwork but rather an exploration of the new concept of digitally remixing existing artworks. The idea was to create something completely new and unlike the original while using elements of the original artwork. 

This is what I came up with:

You can see the patterning in the background as well as the textures on the skin. The hair is also made up of elements from Amanda's painting. The color scheme was also influenced by the original painting. While creating this image I was also thinking about composing the image along the golden section, and controlling the saturation of the colors, as well as the value contrast, to areas that I wanted to stand out the most.

I consider this first painting only a test and exploration of what can be achieved by digitally remixing artworks. I'm looking forward to creating a more involved remix of Amanda Sage's Orphic Awakening as well as other artworks from some of my favorite artists.

Jake Kobrin
http://www.kobrinart.com/
https://facebook.com/jkobrinart