Treasure Hunting

Several days ago I mentioned how plentiful and inexpensive Montana moss agate is, but these things don’t take away from the fact that this type of agate can be a beautiful stone and that it has a personality all its own.

I decided to try to capture some of the uniqueness of one particular piece of Montana moss agate in a digital drawing.  The particular specimen that the drawing was modeled on is very “earthy” looking with some gold tones in the translucent center.

Today I hope to get some photographs taken of a newer batch of ocean jasper that I recently acquired.  This latest sampling actually has some nice translucent samples as well.  Yes, even though it’s called ocean jasper, a lot of it is quite translucent like agate.  From what I have read, there was some discussion on whether to classify it as an agate or a jasper, but the name ocean jasper won out because of the orbicular patterns that are found on many of the specimens.  If you want to read up some more on this, check out this information.

I found myself sucked into Paint Shop Pro again, this time modifying the photo of the ametrine scepter that I posted yesterday.  I thought that if I tried drawing out the purplish tint a bit that I might see the underlying phantom markings a little clearer.  While that didn’t exactly happen, I did get an interesting representation of the surface pattern on the crystal.  

Before I attempt this again, I’m going to have to go back and take several more photographs of the crystal scepter so that I can get a more three-dimensional representation of it.  Maybe if I overlap the photos, I can combine them for some type of panorama depicting what it would look like if the crystal was “unrolled”.  

Oh the lengths I’ll go to in order to avoid getting any real work done!

I love colors. One of my huge weaknesses is that I will sit with a digital editing program and play around with colors for hours. I’m not that great at it, but I do it anyway. I got to thinking today about how pretty the colors were of the blue lace agate that I posted photos of here. So I decided to play around with the photo in Paint Shop Pro a bit.

This is the picture that I ended up with when all was said and done. It’s definitely no work of art, but I kind of like it. It plays up the colors that are present in the banded agate specimen pretty nicely, but it doesn’t really capture any of the texture. I thought about working on it some more to bring the texture qualities in and to mute some of the symmetry from the kaleidoscope look, but I figured I had played enough for one day. So I just saved the image in case I want to go back and fiddle around with it some more later.

The things that can be done with digital editing software are simply amazing. Despite the rest of the world being in love with Adobe Photoshop, I much prefer Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2. One of these days someone might convince me that more can be done with Photoshop and I might switch over, but for now, I can’t think of anything that I really want to do that can’t be handled in Paint Shop Pro.