Award Winners

I am happy to announce that my both of my entries in the 8th annual Figurative Art Competition at the Light, Space and Time Gallery earned awards!!

The gallery received 626 entries from 27 different countries around the world as well as from 32 different states in the U.S.  Artists were asked for their interpretation of the “Figurative” theme by submitting their best abstract or representational art for this competition.  I've been doing quite a lot of digital renders featuring dancers recently, so it was natural for me to enter these two images.

The exhibition has been divided into three media categories.  Painting & Other Media, Photography & Digital and 3D Art.  In addition, there is an overall Winning Artists Category, which is the “best of the best” and consists of the ten (10) best entries comprised from the media categories.

The gallery included Special Merit awards and Special Recognition awards for outstanding art. Many of the artists in either of these groups could have easily been included in the upper tier of our winners, as their art was also exceptional.

So it's a very special honor for me to have been awarded a Special Merit award for my digital artwork, "Dance Like No One is Watching."

In addition, my entry titled "Pas De Deux" earned a Special Recognition in the Photography/Digital Art category.

To say I am thrilled to have won these awards would be an understatement!

You can see all the winning entries in all categories at this link.

Award Winners!

I'm thrilled to announce that I have received an Award of Excellence and three Special Recognition Awards in the "18th Annual Collage, Digital & Mixed Media Juried Online International Art Exhibition.hosted by Upstream People Gallery of Omaha, Nebraska.

The winning entries were selected by the juror Laurence Bradshaw, Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, U. S. A.

Here is what Professor Bradshaw had to say about my work: "'JAYNE WILSON of Tomball, Texas is a star digital artist as seen in all her works. These were all created using digital models, textures and lighting in the digital program DAZ 3D.

The piece "Vintage Photo Studio" shows a very handsome woman sitting comfortably on a period chaise lounge sofa. The overall warmth and tone of the picture adds to the vintage character.

Her "The Indian Pony", another digital rendering on canvas, is very handsome. The brown horse's head with the spotted body of the horse is something that rendering helps to create and here it works quite well.

"A Night on the Town" captures a handsome rendering of a woman and man dressed to impress. The background really sparks the awesomeness of the two together.

Also, "White Horse in the Forest" shows her talent with the beautiful horse center stage with the scraggling tree limbs which is a nice contrast to the smooth body of the horse. And the little gentle birds add a lightness to the mood."'

I would like to thank Professor Bradshaw for this recognition and for his kind words about my work.

The exhibition will be featured online during May, 2016 at www.upstreampeoplegallery.com and continue indefinitely in the archives section of the website.

Additional information may be downloaded from the virus-free links below:

The Indian Pony - Award of Excellence - http://bit.ly/21I06Lg

Vintage Photo Studio - Special Recognition - http://bit.ly/1WgCCgU

A Night on the Town - Special Recognition - http://bit.ly/24AYuIi

White Horse in the Forest - Special Recognition - http://bit.ly/24DyXej

The Making of Dance With Me

When Light, Space and Time Gallery announced their 3rd annual "Figurative" competition, I was hesitant to enter.  I wasn't sure that anything in my portfolio would fit the criteria, but then I remembered "Dance with Me", which I did in 2010.

I had fallen in love with Jack Vettriano's "Dance me to the End of Love" and set about the task of creating a piece with a similar atmosphere to it, using the 3D graphics programs that I was now working with.

It was done in two parts: the background image was created in Bryce 3D and the figures were done in DAZ 3D.

In Bryce, I worked on the ground plane to get a texture that would look similar to the infinite plane the dancers in Vettriano's original were dancing on.

I ended up using a water plane to get the effect I was after.  My dancers are literally dancing on water, lol.

Then I played in the atmosphere editor, positioning the sun and changing the parameters to get the overall color I wanted, and the layer of haze on the horizon.

When I had the background the way I wanted it, I rendered it in Bryce and saved it as a jpeg file that could be used as a backdrop in DAZ 3D.

Now came the really fun part - dressing and posing my 3D characters to recreate the scene and capture the atmosphere of the original.

Since the characters start out in the position shown below (only naked), you can see that quite a bit of work is involved in this step!

Posing a single character in DAZ is fairly easy, even easier if you use one of the many pre-set poses available.  But posing and positioning two characters in a 3D environment, viewed on your 2D computer screen, offers lots of challenges.

For example, when viewed from the front, you might position your characters to be close together as if they were dancing, but then look at them from above and see that they are actually quite some distance apart from one another.  The same can happen if you look from the left or the right too.

So as you work and pose and create your scene, you have to constantly view the scene from all directions to make sure everything is working together.

Eventually, I got my dancers the way I wanted them, as close as I could get them to the dancers in Vettriano's original.  Then I adjusted the lighting to blend with the atmosphere on the background and clicked on RENDER.

Finally I did a little bit of post work in Photoshop Elements - I used the dodge/burn tool to give the illusion of a reflection of the dancers and anchor them to the ground plane, then it was finished.

So, going back to the beginning of my post, when I got the notice about the "Figurative" art competition in April, I went ahead and sent in my entry to Light, Space and Time and now I'm very happy to announce that "Dance with Me" earned a Special Recognition Award!!

The competition received 592 entries from 23 different countries from around the world so you can see how much of an honor this is for me!

All of the winners can be seen here.  My thanks to John Rath for his work in running the Light, Space and Time online gallery and for giving artists like myself the opportunity to participate in competitions and be included in exhibitions.