My Latest Artistic Adventure

Samples of my 2025 Head Art and what's to come.

I’ve been spending a lot of time the past several months doing whimsical artwork and what I call “speed art” which are simple composites that take me about 2 or three hours to complete. They are fun, but they really don’t challenge me artistically.

A few weeks ago, I decided to get back to what I really enjoy, which is my complex “head art” creations. I did several of them in 2025 and many of them I submitted to my Professional Photography Merit Image Review (MIR) process in the Artist category and they received a merit. One of them even received and Image Excellence designation.

I submit to the MIR process just for fun. I no longer need the merits as I already hold my Master Photography and Master Artist credentials from this national organization, but we can always improve our art with continued practice. I don’t submit much photography right now as I’ve spent most of the last 2 years as a fulltime care giver for my husband, and my cameras have sort of been gathering dust on my office shelves. Maybe 2026 they will get to see some use again.

So, my head art… Here are a few samples of the artwork submitted in 2025.

I started out my 2026 MIR submissions with these two artworks

Some of these artworks can take me a week or more as they often contain more than 50 elements. I generate nearly all the assets using Midjourney and then cut them off their backgrounds. The Australian piece I actually generated the pattern art but then built the fragments individually in photoshop by merging the patterns into pieces of torn paper.

The success of this Australian artwork, which is the one that earned the Image Excellence designation, gave me my new idea to build other cultural pieces. So, I began my task to render stories, characters and elements in Midjourney for 7 cultures and I am now in the process of building out artworks about these cultures. The seven cultures are,

The Arctic Inuit and Yupik peoples
The Northwest Coast Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw
The Māori of New Zealand
The Maya of Mexico
West Africa Yoruba
Ancient Egyptians
Native Hawaiians

At the present time I have one artwork complete of a Yupik Hunter. I have three other artworks at the layout/composite stage. I will continue with compositing 4 or 5 more artworks as I also begin the hard work of actually building the art. I plan to submit these pieces to MIR as they are complete. Here is the first one. Hope you like it!