Being Wen Redmond

That's just wish-fulfillment, of course. What I'm actually doing is imitating Wen Redmond. I recently bought her href="https://www.amazon.com/Wen-Redmonds-Digital-Fiber-Art-ebook/dp/B01NAND4V7/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492453399&sr=8-1&keywords=wen+redmond%27s+digital+fiber+art">Digital Fiber Art. I've admired her work for years but hadn't realized how much she uses Photoshop to get her wonderful, colorful, complicated, layered images. Immediately I wanted to fool around with some of my own pictures in Photoshop to see if I could get similar effects.

After fooling around with Photoshop-generated backgrounds, I decided it took less time to make a colorful collage and scan it than it did to mess around in Photoshop trying to make one part of the background look like painted lace, another like torn paper, etc. I made a couple of quick and dirty collages using spray adhesive and my copious collection of paper and fabric scraps.

This is a snapshot I took in New England, of a deserted house under bare trees.

Next I applied the Stamp filter to get a strong black and white image.

I cropped the picture so that the large tree on the right was the dominant image, overlaid it on the pink collage using Multiply blending mode, and cropped again.

This weathered door was another snapshot taken in New England.

Because I wanted to keep the peeling-paint texture of the door, this time I didn't run it through any filters; I just overlaid it on the yellow collage. What? In overlay mode, what else?

I like the subtle, mystical effect of the overlay blending mode here - the door seems to be floating in space. Cutting away the image on either side of the door and inserting a contrasting layer made the floating effect even stronger. This cut's not perfect, but good enough for experimental purposes; if I decide to print this one onto fabric, I'll select the sides very carefully before doing anything else, and try out filling them with different colors and textures. I'm thinking a dark, cloudy sky might look good here.

And finally, here's a snapshot of a jali in Udaipur, layered in Multiply mode over two layers of the yellow collage (one rotated 180 degreea) and the top collage blended in Difference mode.

Nothing so great here, but with a bit more fooling around I think I might come up with something that would be interesting to print on fabric and then to embroider/bead/quilt.

Sky Stairs, and a stray flippant thought

I opened up my news browser to a flurry of headlines saying that the Japanese seriously underestimated the tsunami risk when they built Fukushima.

A while ago, there was a story in the New York Times claiming that along the east coast of Japan there are carved stones set into the earth at intervals with inscriptions that translate roughly to "Don't build below this stone for fear of tsunamis." The story was about one village that actually read the manual and followed the instructions. They survived the tsunami.

So maybe the Japanese should go back to those stones and add a footnote: "Especially if you're building something with the potential to glow in the dark for the next ten thousand years."

And no, the picture doesn't have anything to do with all this. I'm just playing around a lot more in Photoshop now that I've got SuperPrinter and can, at least theoretically, print out images large enough to see the details without actually having your nose right up against the quilt. This is a staircase and a planet "built" out of a Hubble space photo.

As for how SuperPrinter and I are getting along...well, let's discuss that some other time. I think we're building a relationship, but it is fraught with frustration.

Leafing It All Behind

The other day I took a snapshot of this wonderful hole-y leaf. Since then we've had several chilly, damp, dreary days during which my communings with nature have been limited to walks around the block. Brisk walks.

In between brisk little walks and sessions at the sewing machine with Shrine Composition 2 (otherwise known as The Big Purple Thing That I Have to Stitch Together So I Can Put Something Else on the Design Board), I've been playing with this image in Photoshop.

Since the leaf is virtually monochromatic, it was easy to select just the leaf and work on that as a separate layer. First I played with Photoshop's Layer Style options. Using Drop Shadow gave a bit more crispness and definition to the image.



Adding Bevel gives the leaf a little more definition but makes it unpleasantly (to my mind) smooth...



...so I applied a texturizing filter - Craquelure - over that.



Then, going back to the original image, I played with the Atmospherizer filter from Harry's Filters via The Plugin Site to get some decidedly un-natural colors:



then made it a little brighter by duplicating the atmospherized layer and blending it with the previous layer using the "Hue" blending style.



Back to the original again, I used Cybia's Edgeworks plug-in with the "Bright" option to get this:

Once again, I intensified it by blending two copies of the leaf layer, this time using Linear Burn:

A different Edgeworks option - Shine - produced this from the original:

and I blended this layer with a copy of the atmospherized leaf, using Multiply, to jazz it up a little:

Finally, for a definitely science-fictional effect, I used Redfield's Jama 3D to get this image:


All the third-party plugins I've mentioned are freeware and should be downloadable from the links in the post. I haven't tried them with Photoshop Elements but I think they'd probably work with that program too.

Now I'm ready to print some of these on cotton and organza and play with them on the design board - only two loooong seams to do on Shrine Composition 2 first.

Artistic Photo Quilts

Last week's Quilt Festival in Houston was the usual orgy for the eyeballs; I don't think I'm allowed to post any photos of the quilts here, but what the heck - as usual, half the exhibits were No Photography, and SAQA was good enough to put out their own book of their two exhibits.

A slight design flaw (from my point of view; from the pov of the organizers, probably a Machiavellian scheme to get people to spend money) was the fact that there were hardly any chairs or benches in the quilt side of the show, but lots of places to sit down on the vendors' side. I blame this for the fact that I came home with three books and a new clip-on magnifying device for beading. One of the books was Charlotte Ziebarth's Artistic Photo Quilts, which is directly responsible for my spending more time fooling around with Photoshop than doing anything else since the quilt show. It's full of inspiring headers like "Bad Pictures Can Often Be Useful," and "Out of Focus Areas," - and examples to back up her assertion that you don't need a stunning, award-worthy, professional-looking photograph to make a stunning quilt. I love this woman!

The picture is one I took some years ago while hiking, divvied into sections and manipulated using some of the many ideas in her text. Now if I can just stop playing with Photoshop filters and go get some more color ink cartridges and print the sections, I think it might make a really nice small quilt. (And if it doesn't, you'll never hear about this particular bright idea again.)

One thing that frustrates me somewhat is that while Ziebarth gets magnificent results with the Cutout filter, I'm not getting much use out of it when I try to manipulate my images of Rajasthan. Cutout seems to transfer brilliant reds and oranges into muddy brownish earth tones. Any Photoshop gurus have a suggestion to fix this problem?