Abstraction – Taking It Further
I was really inspired by Zed’s use of Photoshop to “abstract” her photos. So I decided to take my sketches from my last post about Ann’s challenge and use Photoshop to see what the results would be. I mainly used filters and I didn’t really keep track of what I did. But if you have Photoshop, you can just play around with the filters until you come up with something you like. If you would like to compare the original pen and ink sketches, go to this post here.
You can click on the photos to see better. This one is the mosaic filter. I really like how the background moves from light to dark. I didn’t really see that in the drawing itself.
I can’t remember what I did to this one but I really like the dramatic contrast between the background and the birch trees. This to me is a much striking composition.
This gives an almost impressionistic feel to the dogwood branches. It looks kind of cool but I think the element that catches the eye in this composition is the lines of the red dogwood branches against the background and this doesn’t really improve that.
I thought this was an interesting effect and it might be the embossing filter. I like the way the blue and the red play off each other in this one.
This is one of the outlining filters, I think. I like the contrast of the darker hill in the background. I also like the outline of black on the dogwood branches as it seems to give them more implied shape.
This one isn’t that changed but does give more outlines than the original and makes it a bit darker. I think this helps to ground the trees.
Now this is abstract. I’m sure I never would have come up with this idea on my own when I was drawing the willows. But I kind of like it. What do you think?
This is another one where I used a mosaic filter. I do like how this filter works. You can see it better if you click on the photo to enlarge it. I don’t think that you could repeat this effect very easily in felt though.
I really enjoyed playing with my sketches in Photoshop. There are a million options and it can give you some ideas that you might not come up with on your own. Which of the sketches do you like now? Which one do you think I should use to make a piece of felt? If you played with abstracting a photo or a sketch in Photoshop, I’d love to see it.
9 thoughts on “Abstraction – Taking It Further”
They look great, Ruth! It looks like you had fun 🙂
I really like the bold birch trees one and the bottom Dogwood-that looks like the ‘fresco’ filter. I really liked how striking the red was on the original Dogwwod picture, maybe putting the saturation up would brighten it back up without losing the effect?
I end up with lists of effects I’ve used in my notebook or file names like ‘face cut out 2 6 1 accent edges 5 21 10 bright con 6 -2’ so I have a clue at what I did!
I can’t decide which I think you should do in felt, either the bold birch or the first abstract willow 🙂
I think those are my two favorite as well. I will take a look at saturation to see how that works. I thought about keeping track but got lazy 🙂
love the last one – took a mosaic felt class with Mehmet Girgic — we made a rug! so fun what a great idea for a new pattern :-0)
Thanks – that sounds like a great class.
I like the new birch trees best, and I think it would translate into a felt picture very nicely.
The willows (blue and green) could lose its impact in felt – it’s difficult to achieve the vivid colours that make the picture stand out – unless you embellished it with fluorescent threads?
The mosaic effect reminded me of the experiment in pointillism.
I agree about the birch trees. Had not thought of the pointillism in conjunction with the mosaics. So I just need to dye nepps all those colors and then put each one in its correct spot. NOT!
I like the blue willows the best. I think you could get a really nice effect if you combine it with free motion embroidery using silk or metallic thread. I like the blue black birches too.
Thanks Ann – I was thinking that embroidery would really help too.