Sloan nota: ideas in visuals and words

Two photos from unsplash.com. Church by ioana-cristiana-gT-b_BSE81I-unsplash. Ship by dylan-shaw-30Oov5eaSso-unsplash.

Using Photoshop Paintbucket Tool and Patterns

to Make Abstractions from Photos

In today’s Playground I worked with two random photos (above) and the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. In the church set I was seeing what kind of abstraction I’d get with the tool — and then seeing how I could alter what I’d done.

If you X out the white strip between the photos above they join well as a mass. They also echo each others’ shapes. It’s not so easy to tell results apart once they’ve been worked on. Obvious now, but unintentional.

Second set with the ship started out as the first did but quickly turned to filling areas with pattern instead of paint, then playing with what scaling the same patterns would do. You see what difference the pattern’s scale makes on your ability to read the pattern and also read the shape it’s filling.

The mountaintop and ship became one shape.

These images were made on my laptop — I didn’t realize what an unsightly gambit I took early on by outlining details of the mountain and sea. Distracting — instead of leading your eye in they push you back out.

Paint has no scale. A close-up of a painted floor doesn’t tell you if it’s the whole floor or just the corner that’s been painted. You need a perimeter, an outline, to make sense of pure color. Otherwise it’s not a red sweater, a red birthday balloon, a red front door. It’s just red, the hue.

CHURCH

Variants by author using Photoshop's Paintbucket tool on photo of church by ioana-cristiana-gT-b_BSE81I-unsplash. Note dark blue triangle upper left vs black on the righthand side.