EXPERIMENTS AND ACCIDENTS

Watermark Design with black background.  Unfinished. © by Ruth Zachary

This image began as a water stain on a plant table. I took a photo of the watermark. The point of this post is to demonstrate how keeping aware of accidental imagery can result in wonderful papers for collage. The camera can be used to capture frost on windows, reflections in water, close-ups of graffiti, and numerous other textures.

I also explained on my Abstract Art blog today that I had forgotten to save the design with a transparent background, and that I would explain how to "remedy" that, later. Actually I am explaining it here.

In Photoshop, the pure white areas of the arrangement were selected, under the Select Menu, where an option allows selection by color. White was selected, and then I filled the selected areas with black. As you can see at the edges of the black, tiny bits of the white can still be seen. This is the remainder of the white areas that were there before.

If the transparent areas had been preserved, these white lines would not have been retained. It was not a perfect fix, but on the other hand,  in some of the layered experiments that followed it, the tiny white edges impacted the other imagery as different modes were applied to the layers.

Watermark Design Layered with Other Textured Image Layers in Photoshop. Unfinished.

Although both examples are a more abstract kinds of images, the  shapes suggest landscape and rock formations. I might choose to finish this, after making some adjustments to what started as a series of accidents. Or the design could become sections for use in a collage of either abstract or realistic art. Any resemblance to real images, people or animals in the above sample are purely accidental.

See my Mixed Media Abstract Art blog for an emphasis aimed at abstraction.

Image and Writing are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.