Monday 18 July 2016

Reading a Paint Surface: Photoshop and Moving into Fabric

  Life has been on hold the last couple of weeks  looking after Ian who had surgery  on 5th July.  He's making progress   but I'm sleeping on the fold up bed which isn't very comfortable and  what sleep I get is punctuated by checking up on him a couple of times during the night.  I have a lot of admiration for full time carers -  hopefully we've only got another week of this .  There's not much time  or energy spare for creativity but I've been  playing around in Photoshop  using photos of my final 2 pieces: adjusting  hue, saturation  and using 'invert' function. I first  used this for the exercises during Elizabeth Barton's Abstract art for quiltmakers as  it inverts tones as well as colour  giving unexpected results. 

 These 2 pictures, above and below, were the originals, ( cropped to portrait format), the remainder inversion , some of them after changes to hue.



Then these 2  below are changes in hue and saturation of my favourite part of the painting where the layers of paint and brushstrokes are evident.



I've printed most of these out on Jacquard inkjet cotton sheets ( having restocked my supplies with  2 packs of 30 , that should keep me going for a while....)  These are currently marinading on my design wall while I decide how to use them as Journal Quilts .
Also in the post besides  inkjet supplies was a copy of  Jane Dunnewold's  'Creative Strength Training' which I  pre-ordered. I've started reading it  and thinking about the exercises but first I want to crystallise my understanding of  the 'Reading a Paint Surface' course now I've had time to ponder what the take -home messages are for me. By coincidence, this week's  Painters Key's  post 'returning to a cold easel' offers a  different perspective  on the same subject.
“The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.” (Georges Braque)


1 comment:

Margaret Cooter said...

Inversion, what a fun tool - sometimes the result really makes you think.
And the quote about the idea disappearing - I interpret that as: if your intent for the work is no longer evident to you, abandon the work. But maybe that's a tad on the negative side?
Best wishes for Ian's recovery!