Making this piece brought me joy, I hope it does for you too
Inspired by collaboration with @everlove and some calligraphy on rice paper.
Process
Thanks for the fun idea here @everlove!
Starting from the original picture I clone stamped out some of the wires in the center and added some decorative circles to emphasize the outline of the main circle using GIMP and Inkscape.
I added a bit of hand drawn calligraphy.
I wanted a more uniform look so I ran it through a pastel type auto painting effect. I liked this version a lot but the dark black was not quite what I liked.
I liked the purple color so I changed the decorative circles fill color to match the purple in the original photo and tried this Cezanne type auto painting effect which I liked too. I wanted the big outline circle to be more visible though.
So I tried this realism effect which was nice but I liked most of the previous picture better because it had more of a rice paper kind of look which is what I felt the most inclined towards for this work. Back in GIMP I added a mask to this image and combined it with the previous one to get the final image shown at the start.
Thanks for reading! Please let me know if you have any suggestions or what you think of the images.