Here are two things I seldom do:

1. Find photos on the Web and do stuff with them
2. Fiddle around with Photoshop art filters

In this case, I saw a photo of a nude woman that I found particularly striking. I cropped her out of a larger image and started fiddling around with some of Photoshop’s art filters to create a new image.

There’s a word for this sort of artwork: it’s called “Derivative Work”. Here’s a definition of Derivative Work from Wikipedia:

In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyright-protected elements of an original, previously created first work (the underlying work). The derivative work becomes a second, separate work independent in form from the first. The transformation, modification or adaptation of the work must be substantial and bear its author’s personality to be original and thus protected by copyright.

There have been several legal battles over derivative works, often with the argument that a derivative work wasn’t “derivative” enough–i.e., too close to the original..(!)

I’m most familiar with the work of Richard Prince, who, according to sources on the web, began appropriating others’ photographs in 1975 to create his own artworks. He would actually photograph other photographers’ photographs and call them his own. Other artists have taken others’ photographs and put them into collages or manipulated them in other ways to create something quite different and new.

In this case, I took the photo of a nude woman and applied a Photoshop filter. I wasn’t totally happy with the results of the filter; so I continued to manipulate the image with some of Photoshop’s other tools until I reached a final result I was happy with.

Nude in Red

Like I said, I don’t do this sort of thing very often (almost never), but I enjoyed playing around with this one…and maybe I’ll try some more. Let me know what you think!

🙂

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