Saturday, July 03, 2010

Using Altered Photos


I suppose most of you are out enjoying the holiday weekend, camping or boating or picnicking. Our weather has been pretty rotten so I am doing indoor things, although not studio indoor things. Still procrastinating, this time in front of the computer. But this is good procrastination (or so I tell myself). Remember the poppy photo that I ran through a plasma flame displacement map? I thought it was something I could print out on fabric to use as a padfolio cover. First I would have to tile it to make a continuous design the length needed for the cover - about 15 inches. The left side will form the flap, the right side the front of the padfolio.


But you know me, I can't stop with just one. I wanted to see what it would look like if I stretched the portrait-oriented image across the expanse of the landscape-oriented canvas. Better than I expected.


And then the questions was, what if I rotate it so that it is oriented the same as the canvas and stretch it to be the same size? I like the dark along the left that will become the flap.


Then my mind leaped to a different idea of creating a mirror image to line up with the original once it had been sized back to half the width of the canvas. I just wanted to eliminate that really light area on one side and got this great design. Not a padfolio design, I'm thinking, but perhaps a stand alone wholecloth quilt, or to be printed out multiple time, some in mirror image top to bottom, to be sewn together to build the design. Surely I must stop the brain now that I am past my original reason for play. I really don't need new ideas to add to the many already waiting in line!


But I do like that green area, and played with shifting it over so that it would fall on the front of a padfolio, and the orange of the poppy would fold over it as a flap.

Once you start this kind of computer play, you really can spend hours and hours coming up with variations, some quite accidental. While rotating one of the long images, my mouse slipped and it stopped angled. Dang. Except, wow - now the image is on the diagonal, a very cool look for a piece of fabric. I tried widening it to cover the corners of the canvas, but at that point my program warned I was getting into mega memory territory and did I really want to do that? No, not with this computer, which is old, and cranky and short on memory compared to the standard one gets these days. A thought for another day.

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