About me
Hey there! I'm Arsinoë Sarantidi and this is my brand Inspiraft. I'm a photographer who captures everything interesting, but I work more often with nature themed photos than anything else.
While I usually enhance my photos only as needed to make their colours pop out a little more, sometimes I may follow a longer process for the images that inspire me more to work on. And these are the images that you will see more often while you peruse my artworks.
Why the name Inspiraft?
Inspiraft comes from the blending of two words: inspire and craft. And that's where the tag-line "Inspired to craft" also came from. Some wordplay is also involved, hence why the logo is actually a raft with a spindle instead of a sail. The reason? Some story spinning is always involved, no matter how subtle it may be. Not all images have an obvious story to tell, but there is always a story somewhere that waits to be discovered.
My image processing workflow in brief
Note: While there may be external links in the text below, they aren't affiliate links. Therefore, I earn nothing if you click on them. However, the products below are free and powerful tools that are also well known and trusted and which I have also incorporated into my workflow.
After a photo-shooting session out in the world, which ensures I get a large collection of photos, I separate those images that stand out from the rest in their own folders each. Then I create as many copies of the same image file as I need. For the artworks in my early collections 2013-2019 and 2020-2022, I used to do the bulk of the work in Photoshop using actions to speed up an already lengthy process. I would apply a single action to each copy of my original image. This automated step would take a while to complete and, once done for all copies of my image, I would choose one copy as the basis and slowly add the other copies, or parts thereof, and blend them together until I get a result I like.
Since I moved away from Windows OS and into Linux, I ditched Photoshop from my workflow and replaced it with a series of open-source and free tools. Now, I edit each of the image copies using either a different effect in FotoSketcher or a different filter in GIMP. Just like before, I blend the processed copies together in GIMP until I get the desired result. After this step is done and, depending on how much further I wish to keep processing the image in question, I move my work to other tools. If I need to add vector graphics in my work, I will create that part in Inkscape. If I need to add some custom brush strokes, I will create them in either GIMP or Krita. Sometimes, I may even create brush strokes using real paints on a real canvas. After the canvas dries, I scan them and incorporate them into my image as I see fit.
And that's what gives the handmade feel in my artworks, despite the fact that the process is almost entirely done in a digital environment.