A long time ago, in a lifetime far, far away, I studied marine biology and invertebrate zoology at San Francisco State University. It was definitely a learning experience: I discovered that I'm not a field scientist at heart and I get brutally seasick. Eventually I got a real job and moved on to other things, but I still love my little sea beasties, as long as someone else takes the photos!
Fast forward a couple of decades, and I'm collecting images for a workshop with Sue Benner called "Driven to Abstraction: Developing Abstract Imagery." I'm looking forward to the retreat but it will be a real stretch, since I am pretty darned left-brained. When I work from photos, I tend to want to use those same colors and keep the color placement fairly true to the original. That doesn't sound abstract, does it? :-)
As a warm-up for the retreat, I thought I'd play with some photos in Elements. The idea is to see if I can "goo up" the photos enough so they feel more abstract, but I don't want to obliterate them quite yet (the way the Liquify filter would, for instance). So here goes...
Nudibranchs (shell-less mollusks) are some of my favorite critters because they come in outrageous colors and fantastic body shapes. I did some internet searches and have come up with a great selection of photos to play with. The
image above is by Chriswan Sungkono and was taken in Indonesia (Wikimedia Commons). The background is wonderfully colorful and "mushy" as it is, but the sea slug really stands out.
I made copies of the background image and tweaked them with the Watercolor, Posterize and Crosshatch filters. I like the way the filters worked on the background, deepening the shadows, but they had much less impact on the critter than I expected:
It is fun to revisit the past, this time more creatively (no actual dissections involved!!!) I doubt Photoshop even existed when I was in grad school, and I certainly wouldn't have guessed I'd be working with my little invertebrate friends in this way. Stay tuned for more fun!
A long time ago, in a lifetime far, far away, I studied marine biology and invertebrate zoology at San Francisco State University. It was definitely a learning experience: I discovered that I'm not a field scientist at heart and I get brutally seasick. Eventually I got a real job and moved on to other things, but I still love my little sea beasties, as long as someone else takes the photos!
This has been a fun little project -- a fabric postcard in decidedly unnatural colors! We (members of my sit and sew group) each picked one or more vintage images from the "Dancing Poppies" collage sheet by ArtChix to be used in an item to be shown at our September meeting. I picked a seed packet, and since I have the original file, I can play in digital land!
Just a quick update -- the sewing machine has to go back to Portland (a 3.5hr drive each way) to get the power supply replaced. Grumble grumble!
Our quilt show is over and I managed to get my challenge quilt done in time. I may do a bit more quilting on it, but thought you'd like to see what I've been up to the last two weeks. Our theme was "Starry, Starry Night" and I based the color scheme and placement on a photo of a supernova taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The pattern is "Shakespeare in the Park" by Judy Martin (I changed the color placement to focus on the 4 large reel blocks). It was fun playing with color and value to make some of the border stars stand out and have some barely visible in the night sky. The quilt is approximately 60" x 60" and I'm quite pleased with it.
