Ram in Altered States

One of our first rams was a beautiful Barbado hair sheep ram.  There really was nothing much to fault him on, he has a great hair coat and shed fully in the spring, fantastic horns, he was not aggressive at all so we never felt afraid of him.  The only problem with him was that he was totally sterile.

We had purchased him at an auction and after keeping him for a year without getting any lambs it was pretty clear that perhaps he was past his prime.  We never did have a vet check him, we just sold him at auction with the suggestion he be used as a pet.

As he was handsome I one day did a painting of him using acrylic paints. I really liked the way his horns looked in the painting, I have painted horses and dogs before, but never painted anything with horns.  I love how the horns turned out although I am not particularly happy with the mouth, but never mind...

So today as I was a bit bored and looking through some of my older photographs I came upon a picture of the painting of this Barbado hair sheep ram and thought I might mess about with it in Corel Paint.  I am not really familiar with the program all that much, I just sort of play with it, doing this or that, seeing if I like it and if not I do something different.

I sort of like the image I created today, so wanted to share it with you.  Digital art can be very interesting.

Designing a Fractal Lamb

Hi Everyone.

Today is sunny out so what am I doing inside?  Well, I had this picture I took of one of the lambs a few days ago and really wanted to do something different with it.  This is one of Favorite Sheep's lambs, and the lamb looks great but the background is distracting.  I am no expert on improving a background the proper way, but I do know how to alter a photo a fun way. 

I am writing this without knowing what the final image will look like, as I will be doing it as I write, so I hope it turns out as good as I expect.

Here is the original photograph, cropped to remove even more clutter.  Cute lamb but she is almost lost because of the snow, so I will add some color, dark ones to make her pop out.

At this stage I know it does not look good, I colored her eyes black and added a twinkle which I hope will turn out okay in the final image.  Which will be produced by tweeking the picture using Corel Photo Paint Redfield effect called Fractalius.

I produced a couple of images I was happy with, one softer and one more arty.  I am going to share the more arty one with you.  You can see the softer one here.  Neither are what I was expecting.  I think I would have preferred a solid background for both - but I will leave that for another day because now I must go clean the barn.  Anyhow here is the image.

Note all pictures are copyright to me, not for reproduction.

Turning Patsy Sheep into Art

Patsy, as you may recall, is a Jacob x Barbado sheep ewe.  She has 5 horns, although in this picture you can only see 3 horns clearly.  Even though it is spring we still have a foot (or more) of snow here, and not much can be done outside, so I thought I would take a picture of Patsy and do some photo manipulation work to it using a program called Corel Photo-Paint 8. 

Here is the original photo of Patsy sheep.

This is not a great picture, she is at a funny angle, there are the legs of another sheep in the background, and the upper corners are bright and distracting.  As such it is a good photo to have fun with and turn into some art.

Photos, of course, are copyright owned by myself, not for reproduction!

I first had to add some color to the white parts in the background, and blur out the pair of legs.  I also had to make Patsy's eye darker so it would not be lost in the art rendition. 

I came up with several images, this is just one.  Here I used a program called Fractalius. 

If you would like to see the other images (including one where she looks more like a rug), and the steps used to get this image, you can see the full link called Art, Fun with Patsy.

Other Links of Interest

How to Take Better Photographs of a Pet

Painting Sheep -this blog

Patsy has Twins - this blog