My Simple Still Life Challenge Entry
Tuesday, August 9th, 2005I took the Simple Still Life Challenge. I would have liked to work with the colors in the piece and make something out of fiber or maybe get out my printmaking supplies. Instead, I worked with PhotoShop to make a digital image that looks a lot like a screen print. Think Andy Warhol, who used photographs as the basis for screenprints.
I love using digital photos to create something that is not digital at all! Usually that means I transfer my digital image onto a soft print block, carve the print block and then print the image on paper (sometimes on polymer clay sheets). This time I went from digital to digital. I have not done that nearly enough, so this was fun.
I’ve been interested in making screen prints for many years now and never have tried it. However, here I made something photo-screenprint-like and I’m very pleased with it.
I chose to work with the essence of color in the original picture. The first tiny image here is a thumbnail photo of her original (here it is shown at 33% original size). You can see it is mostly leaf green and terra cotta. I determined to use a blue-green (OK, turquoise/aqua which is definitely my favorite color), and a sort of peachy/salmon version of the clay pot color. (Interesting, I also used this very color as one of the trim colors on my house/porch, in addition to a soft purple.)
I played with levels and curves, then made the image greyscale, then made it into a 50% black/white bitmap. I deleted all the white so that about half of the image was transparent.
I then added a layer and put it underneath. I painted that layer my chosen colors, and they showed through in the proper spots.
Then I saved the whole thing as a .GIF file (GIF is excellent for images that have very few colors, such as logos… and this GIF has only 4 colors in it).
It’s interesting, my PhotoShop program really flipped out when I tried to “Save for Web” so I had to copy and paste the image into a new file. The new file could save fine. Something about the original .jpeg file did not get along with my version of PhotoShop!
So there you have it! Lynn’s quick but fun answer to the still life challenge. I hope that for another Challenge I’ll have more leisure time and can do something in another medium besides digital. In this case, though, I enjoyed it. I have not done digital images as an artform enough. I use PhotoShop almost every day, but more as a journalist to illustrate my blog columns. I enjoy using it for other purposes.
Other artful projects in which I’ve used digital photos, are the blockprint of Elizabeth at her cabin and my blockprint self portrait. I also did a very, very fun digital collage using three different photos and some freehand image editing/painting, in my flying woman piece. It was fun to do this image, as it has been far too long since I approached PhotoShop as an artist rather than a columnist.
Thanks to Debra for the challenge. For those who haven’t committed yet, the deadline is 20 days away, on August 28. You have plenty of time! Dive in, the water’s fine!