Sunday, February 14, 2016

Playing with Photos for Screens

Have you ever considered how you might use your own photos in your art quilts or mixed media work?  There are several products available to create photo transfers.  You can also print photos on sheer fabrics like organza to create a different effect.  Some people use photos as the basis for a landscape or portrait quilt, using it to make a pattern for piecing.   At PGFiber2Art we like to use photos as the basis for thermofax screens.  Yesterday we taught our class on how to use Photoshop Elements to turn photos into black and white images suitable for screens. 

When using this pink flower as a sample image for our students to work with, we were reminded of how many different ways an image can be manipulated for different outcomes, excited by the "what if"....what if we created several variations of the same image and used them together?  
Photoshop Elements is a powerful program and has many filters that can be applied to a black and white image.  Below is the black and white image of the flower with the background removed.
Once we have gotten an image to this point we start applying filters from the Filters menu.  There are lots to choose from and it just takes some time playing to see what you like best, but usually we settle on one.  Each filter also has its own options that allow you to adjust things like darkness, contrast, details, etc. so the possible outcomes are many.  Just for the fun of it we decided to apply different filters to this flower to illustrate the options for our students.  And that's when the light bulb went on and we realized that this could be a cool design element.  Here are 5 different filters applied to the flower image.
These will be made into screens in a variety of sizes, and then the fun with fabric and paint will begin.  Can you visualize how multiple variations of the one image will work together?  Hope to get to work on this idea in the next couple of weeks and will post pictures of the results.

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