Abstraction process

A master piece of Picasso's art, "The Three Musicians" is one of my favorite painting. Recently I have been inspired by the concepts of song sampling to be applied to art. In song sampling, a musician eletronicly breaks down a song into phrase that he assigns to keys on a keyboard to be rearranged and mixed in new ways. The sampled song often doesn't sound anything like the new product. Using photoshop you can break a picture down and recreate it in a mind-boogling number of ways. This is just one of them

In the ever progressing effort to innovate on something innovative, I have applied a photoshop abstraction method to the three musicians. In abstract paintings, the use of rigid lines is rare, so I want to rid myself of detail. I used a blur filter and brush to do this. The next step was to change the color scheme. Here I used blue and orange as the dominates, by applying the charcoal and chalk filter. After that filter you're left with gray, blue and orange as the only colors. To add my secondary colors, yellow and purple I used a color replacer adjustment to remove colors of gray and replace them with those. Than I went to town with my smudge tool to get the desired level of smoothness and blur and other effects like that. Finally I added a point of interest, a vector shape stripe orange blue, purple, and yellow to the mid-left.