Ooops....I'm on catch up!!

Although I have been doing the work, my blog updating has been a little laps as late.  So here follows a number of exercises with conclusion and analysis!

The first experiment is the colour swatch wotsit.  I created 16 squares and filled them with promarker colours, one sheet on trace and one on paper.  Then got them both scanned on my A4 scanner and then re printed both on my printer.  For anyone who is interested I use at home an Epson Photo PX700W, which is a scanner/printer combination.  Great at scanning most things although I sometimes find scanning gloosy pages causes shimmering across the image.  I'm sure there is a way of controlling that, but yet to find out.  The printer side is excellent for photo quality imagery, however this thing takes 6 individual cartrideges costing just over £50 to replace the set.......and they be disappearing fast my friends!!!

Anyway.....away from the boring stuff, here are my results.  (The top selection) The colours originally on paper have tended to come out a little duller; less vibrant to the pen colour. (The bottom selection) The colours here also came out duller but from the trace have a kind of silvered finish when you see the whole set of colours together.
....is anyone bored yet!  I think the one thing I have learnt from this is to realise that you have to experiment with your medium and your output everytime you change something.  IE you need to test print from every printer you use and compunsate accordingly.  I would advise sending your swatch to Uni printers and Media Tech.

Right that's that out the way.  Here are my pretty photoshop pictures produced from the paper model exercise.

I thought I was being clever using my own photos as I new the quality was good, but I didn't bank on how bad print is from a Sunday magazine.  If you don't balance up (or down as the case may be) the qualities in each component of your picture it simply looks crap!  I would encourage everyone to start creating a library of your own photography of people, skies, trees etc (that you shot on your own cameras I mean), to make life a little easier.

The other little touch I have picked up is to soften the edge of the shadows just a little.  This makes them look just that little bit more realistic than just thinning out the opacity.  Cheers for that Dom.

This bucket filling within a trace outline, I forgot I hadn't put on the blog.  Not sure if I really understand the point of it as a repeating pattern looks RUBBISH, so why would you use it????  I did have trouble sampling my own sample as I have Version 7 of Photoshop and can't seem to get that technique to work, but I know there is a way of doing it.   So if anyone knows please let me know.  Anyway I used the existing patterns saved on the bucket fill already.  I sampled each section of my shape on different layers in order to change the balance and contrast to give an effect of shading.  Looks a bit like software from the 90's, but hey, I tried.

Here are my results

Ok......I think this is the last thing for now, but I have more to add on soon.  This is my DYNAMIC COMPOSITION.....although I use the word dynamic loosley!!!   I experimented first on powerpoint with some smaller images, just to arrange roughly and find out what worked well.  Then I took the best composition and repeated it in Photoshop.  I mucked around with the colours to balance up the 4 images, because as they stood they had no linking qualities and looked on next to eachother no matter where you put them on the page.

Messing about with the hue and saturation, the effect reminded me of a process in photography called cross processing.....back in the days of film which of course shows my age some what.  Cross processing was when you developed colour negative film in a transparency (slide) film process or visa versa.  The reults would give you this kind of psychedelic finish.  So 'Cross-process' became my word to connect these images.  Unfortunately, I don't think anyone else will get it and my placing of the text is quite boring.  So even though I printed this up as A1.......I aint happy!  So after consulting with Lissy last week about using the word 'Curiousity' which was my original idea but I'd shelved it, I have come up with another option.  As all the figures are looking into my model or being 'curious about them, it does seem an obvious outcome.  Let me know what you think........I'll find out soon enough as it's Monday Crit tomorrow!!!!!!
Here are my efforts......