Y-Knot Blog: The Other Kind of Mirror Writing

We left-handed folks are famous for being able to write backwards, aka, mirror writing. But when I travel, I enjoy a different kind of mirror writing. In fact, it's now one of the things I do.....draw on steamed hotel bathroom mirrors, turn off the lights, turn on the flash and have at it. My own bathroom at home doesn't have a mirror in it, so this is the only time I can play. Afterwards I wipe it down with a towel and turn on the fan, but I have to have my fun first.

This is my first morning's effort. It had already dripped a lot by the time I brought in the camera. I love the way the long mirror went from light with dark lines to dark with light lines, the further away from the camera it was.

I turned this one into a threshold image, forcing the camera to either chose pure white or pure black. Since you can adjust the amount, I end up with a lot of blending. Again the dark/light areas run into each other.

So I took the simplified black and white image above and turned it into kaleidoscope images. It looks a lot like stitching.

Another, thinner lined effect:

And one where I emphasized the darker part of the image. Looks like 6 insect bodies with wings, heads are obscured. It would be neat to carve these as stamps, though I would have to invent a head, I suppose.

My steam images from the next morning.

I may have to travel again soon so I can do more of this!

And here is where I discovered something quite interesting. When I shined the flash on the mirror and took a photo, it made a reflection of the lines on the adjoining wall.

In fact, as I discovered to my amazement, you don't even need to include the mirror in the photo to get the marks on the wall.

Here I only took a photo of the wall, no mirror involved at all. And the shadows still showed! Life is a mystery.....revealed on a hotel bathroom wall....

I took my mirror photos and turned them into black and white threshold images. Then layered them over more colorful photos of art, trees, leaves, etc. It helps if the item below is not broken up into a lot of separate areas and is fairly monochromatic.

version 1:

version 2. I slide the two layers around until I like the results, so even with the same two images as layers there are a lot of variations possible. And my filters like to make a firm distinction between the black and the white areas, making the white completely transparent while holding the black at full value.

I inverted the black and white image to get a matching pair.

Back to making thin lined kaleidoscope images:

inverting it:

And putting fall leaves behind.

Here I combined a mirror image with one of a selection of blue green origami paper and a non-altered mirror photo (not converted to black and white).

Made a kaleidoscope variation (see below) and stamped over the colored squares.

This one also originated in a mirror photo that I didn't reduce to black and white. The dark yellowish tone of the actual photo muted whatever colors I added to in subsequent layers.