Animated Calendula Star Tutorial

I have a created an animated tutorial showing how to create the digital flower stars. I plan to add another on making the rectangular backgrounds. I have these and other animation projects posted on You Tube. You can subscribe to my channel to receive alerts of new creations. I will add other tutorials in time.

Teddy Bear Cholla Patterns

At the top are two digital flower stars made with photos of teddy bear cholla flowers. The designs emerge from cutouts of the flower petals. Below them is another star made with photos of the thorns. I turned it red to serve as a background behind my flower mandala. I refer to this as a radial background. Below it is a rectangular background made with the thorns. Both types of backgrounds have their uses, and exhibit thier own kind of beauty.

20101 Christmas Designs

Here are more examples of star patterns that I used in this year's Christmas designs. The two at the bottom are interesting in that both were made with the same triangular cutout of ice plant foliage. In one, I pointed the lighter end of the resulting diamond shape outward; in the other I put it in the center. As you can see two very different designs emerge from this simple variation. At the top, I took one of the foliage stars, darkened and blurred it for use as a background.

Pink Tree Bell Elements

Here are stars, a diamond, and a dodecagon made from triangular cutouts of flower petals. At the top, is another array expanded to wallpaper pattern. Do you begin to see the possibilities here? This is another way that surprising patterns can be allowed to emerge from the natural plant elements. It is nature plus applied symmetry.

Radiating Backgrounds

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Up until now, I have been creating background patterns on a rectangular grid pattern. While those are very interesting and have many uses, these radial patterns make a lot more sense for use with the mandalas.
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These are made by taking triangular cutouts from flower petals. They were originally pink, but I turned them blue by desaturating in Photoshop and adding a color overlay. I then used the horizontal flip function to create a mirror image and fused them to create symmetrical triangles or diamonds. By rotating them around the central axis 12 times, we get these patterns. I could have worked at making them fit together seamlessly, but I allowed the lines between the triangles. I created a layer behind the rays with a suitable solid color and then applied a radial gradient to it so that the lines are darker in the center and gradually lighten toward the periphery. I think it is a nice effect, but you may or may not want to include it.
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I think you will appreciate that there are endless variations that can be done with this.

Ocitillo Array 1A

With these ocitillo designs, I advanced the techniques in several ways. I kept the mandala simple and expanded it as what I am calling a mandala arrray. I used other elements around the mandala to create this complex of interlinked components. I then expanded the array into a 9 plex pattern above. This can be further expanded to create a wallpaper. This in itself can become a background. One could blur, fade and darken or lighten it to serve as such.
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I used triangular cutouts to create the dodecagons(12 sided polygons) you see at the top. I took triangular cutouts from foliage and flowers and radiated them around a center to create the designs you see here. These can serve as center or other elements for a mandala or be used as part of an array as shown here.
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I can add even more symmetry to these designs, by taking the triangular cutouts, duplicating them, flipping them horizontally, and fusing them to create the triangles. There is so much that can be done with this, and to me the fun is in the surprise. You can't tell ahead of time what pattern will emerge from this process.

Cactus Shapes for Design

At the top, is the original photo I used of the nightblooming cactus. While its flowers are spectacular, the cactus is not that exciting from an artist's visual perspective. I needed to find a way to use it and make it more interesting in the process.
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I started with some simple cutouts of diamond and oval shapes. This is quite easy to do in Photoshop. Examples are in the top row above.
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Next, I took a triangular section and duplicated it, flipping it horizontally to create a mirror image. I combined the two and came up with the diamond and oval shapes you see in the next rows. The third, larger diamond in the center took things a further step. With it, I combined 4 triangles rather than 2; to create this more complex design. I could do the same with the ovals.
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It took me awhile to figue out how to make a triangular cutout with Photoshop's marquee tool. It will make rectangular or square cutouts, or circular or oval cutouts. To create a triangle, I took a square or rectangular cutout and used the paintbrush tool with a click in one corner and a shift click in the opposite corner to create a straight line from corner to corner. I then used the paint brush to block out one half of the square in a solid color. I then used the magic eraser to remove that half of the shape, leaving me with a triangle. One can then use the shape tool and drag the handles to adjust the shape to what is needed. Combine two or four triangles to create a diamond shape. Do the same with the ovals.
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On the bottom left, is a rectangular cutout. I duplicated it and created the square you see in the middle. I used this to create the background for this mandala. I took a field of 85% gray and superimposed this shape over it. I then reduced the opacity until the gray showed through to dull the color enough to serves as a background. I then blurred it a bit with Gaussian blur so that it wouldn't compete too much with the foreground.
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I will be using this same technique with other foliage sections for other mandala designs. You artists in the group could finds lots of uses for this approach.