paintings prints and stuff

Digital experiment with small abstracts. Vivien Blackburn I'm working out options for this series.   The original ones were manipulated in photoshop, playing with colour variations and rotating/flipping. I quite like the idea of doing a series of 9 framed liked this on either black or white. Which do you prefer for the background - black or white? I think the white background has a clean freshness but the black has an added glow.  

Final stage - using levels and colour balance to regain warmth and correct tonal values So - today is showing how I adjust the photograph in the same way as I did the scan and showing the stages. I won't repeat the stages (see yesterday's post) but the effects of scans and photos are a bit different - sometimes I like one better, sometimes the other. The warmth was put back into the image again using colour balance and the tonal values sorted out with Levels. (see yesterday's post) stage 2 duplicating layers A bit too dark in parts but this will be adjusted in levels and using the colour balance in the final version above. This has put back the darks and the pale colour in the sky that had been lost. stage 1 - an untouched photograph taken in dull natural light Much too pale and the paper much to cold and white, not the creamy colour of moleskine. I suppose I could take time to reset the white balance on the camera - but haven't actually investigated how to do t...

stage 3: Final image using scanner with adjustments in Photoshop I've been comparing scans and photographs of this little sketch of evening fields in coloured pencil in a moleskine sketchbook. I find coloured pencil can be difficult to reproduce. Scanners or cameras can pick up the top layers of colour too strongly (And I scumble lots of layers). With cream coloured paper they make it too white, using the cream for their white balance and that makes the whole image cooler. There may be better ways but this is the way I try to solve it: With the Scanner scan image into Photoshop or similar programme - I don't like to make the adjustments in the scanner if it isn't quite right, as photoshop has more options so I usually accept the scan as it is in Photoshop duplicate the layer look at options for the opacity of this laye r - this one needed 100% opacity but this is variable. This intensifies the colours without distorting them and doesn't usually darken the pa...