Y-Knot Blog: Variations on Some Themes

I should have posted this a couple of weeks ago but I'm just catching up (before plunging into the next art class assignments.....I'm behind but needed a mental break).

I took some photos.....some were decent, but several where not so.....blurry, or exposed wrong, or something. I decided that they could still be used to make designs. These designs are giving me ideas for future collages, stamp carving, etc. etc.

Here is a banana leaf from the outside of the Sawtooth Building where my 12 x 12 group meets. I love the texture of the leaves contrasted with the wood door and the bricks beyond it.

I used the threshold filter on my phone to make it black or white. This is different from a black and white photo, which will include shades of gray. Here each pixel is either black or white, no in between shades.

For good measure I took the above photo and reversed the colors.

Then I used either one or the other threshold images above and made multiple layers with the original colored photo. There are several layer relationships that can be chosen that change colors of the components. Combining this with either black or white tended to separate the color areas more, making the image more cartoon like and certainly stranger.

A lot of these are quite similar....sorry to be boring, potential reader, but I want to record my variations so if I try to recreate it later, with a better photo, I will at least have some clues as to possible results. Often the colors would darken too much with all the revisions and I would need to brighten and intensify them again, It might be fun to make a print of a series of these, sort of an Andy Warhol approach to banana leaves.

This last one reduced the colors to raised or sunken areas....all being a matter of illusion where the edges meet....is it rising up or sinking down?

This wasn't the world's worst photo to begin with, but I wanted to use it because the areas were well defined.

Threshold version:

Layered versions with colors added back in, reversed, etc.

My morning walk produced a black velvet band and a faded rose, discarded on the street, perhaps after a night of wild revelry.

So far I have only thresholded it. Adding the red back in didn't work well.

I went to a protest that seemed to have largely fizzled.....All I got was some great balloon photos and this shot of one of the structures near the Ferry Building entrance in San Francisco.

Threshold version

When you add layers there is a "color" filter that does strange things with the colors. This one turned my blue sky, when combined with the black and white image, into a crazed swirl. I liked the fuzziness of the swirl combined with the greater precision of the structures.

I think I took the top image and just reversed all of the colors.

Here is a more plain layering of black and white and original with the blue sky. It looks like the stage set for a dystopian play.

Back to nature, here is a teasel from Tilden Park. You can't go wrong with a teasel photo.

Threshold version. You can control how much black and white show, but too much in one direction or the other and a lot of details are lost.

What follows are a lot of variations. Unlike an expensive photo editing program, you cannot reproduce the steps you took to get a particular result. I have some general ideas of what filters I used, but I have often left off important details and have not been able to recreate them.

There is a set of filters called gradient map, which change the basic colors before you run the other filters on them. So you could potentially have several hundred variations.

Last of all, we go "high tech", using my car dashboard, which is my favorite subject whenever I am stuck waiting for someone and I need to draw or photograph something. I know the three knobs in the bottom by heart, so I can turn up the heat, change fan position, clean the back window without needing to look down while driving.

Here are two threshold versions. I seem to have changed the perspective on one of them? They look almost alike but I will leave them both so I can savor the mystery a while....

I think I mostly fooled around with the color gradients.

Also I made a version of the black and white that is "embossed", that is, it shows the colors as raised portions by adding highlights and shadows. Since it was already in black and white, what results here is pretty clear, only changing the appearance at the edges of the black and white blocks.