This art is in response to 's Christmas Ornaments Contest, which you can find HERE -- it runs through Dec. 24!
This ball is presented to , in invitation for him to check out
's Christmas Ornaments Contest! I chose blue for this theme because
is the MASTER of the ball point pen in blue when it comes to art. You can see a lot of his work in the Sketchbook Community, including this AMAZING portrait of a lady here! Me? I need an entire digital art program to do what he can do with a simple ink pen -- so, talent (me) hereby recognizes GENIUS (him)!
, we would love to see what you can do with making a Hive Ball, if you have time and can join the fun!
All right, so how was this ball made ... this was a doozy of a project ... of course I started with 's form ball, which you'll find on the contest main page --
However, this is where the difficulty started ... it is hard to get a whole ocean in a little ball, even if it is two takes on a great fractal ocean in Apophysis 2.09!
The first one would not fit because it takes up all the space as a straight rectangle -- this figure REQUIRES a rectangular frame to be what it is!
The second figure would not fit as it was because even though the key part of it is rounded, that's more of a ROUNDED RECTANGLE, and that was simply not going to go into that perfectly round ball .. but I realized that if I squeezed that figure into a curve, I could get the wave part into the ball ... but then that left half the sea just falling out into the white, and when I attempted to turn that outside indigo to mask some of that, the indigo shot all the way up into the figure, destroying the wave appearance.
So, for the first time, I had to mess with the frame itself ... if you look carefully, the Surf's Up Ball is a little further to the left than the original form ... I inscribed the portion I needed to keep of the wave fractal in a NEW CIRCLE that I put out to roughly match the old frame, and then changed the exterior color without the interior being affected. I then erased the old frame, leaving the new circle to stand in its place. I then changed the interior color to a light, warm blue to set off the deeper blues in the wave fractal, and there we have it!