Lurid transformations

A quick tutorial on changing the colours of photos in Photoshop. I'm using the full version, not sure what happens in Elements or other editing programs, but the principle will be the same. (The web provides all sorts of info on Levels and Channels.)

Levels are used to correct tone and colour - taken to extremes, these "corrections" can be creative!

Starting with the original photo, bring up Levels (Control+L) and use the drop-down menu under Channels - shown by the blue highlight in the box. You'll see that RGB consists of a red channel, a green channel, and a blue channel -

The red channel is chosen. Look closely at the sliders under the black hump -

For this adjustment, the slider on the left has been moved to where the hump starts (that's to get rid of "the empty pixels" and make the pic just a bit more defined). Crucially, the slider in the middle has been moved on top of the left slider - making the picture shades of red.

Let's try it in the other direction - moving the middle slider all the way to the right makes the light area disappear almost completely -

 so we need to decide at what point the picture is "non-red" enough, without losing the light -

Now the slider is a bit to the left, but still in the blue-green colour range. 

Making this sort of adjustment in all three channels gives six very different colourways, all from one original photo -

Almost the last of the bookwraps

Another handful to add to the still-growing stack

For an A5 book, two of the four made from the same silk piecing -

(this, in fact)

A5 again, leftovers from the big "River" quilt ...

... which is now in the upstairs hall

A4, from a starch-resist print that wasn't quite wide enough

Top, a laborious embroidery from the mid-90s;
below, monoprints of faces, from the same era

The laborious embroidery in its unaltered state - it's
much improved as a book wrap, don't you think?

It's amazing what you find in the cupboard that can be put to good use! Half a dozen bookwraps are almost ready to bind, and there's only one possible sewing day before the delivery date, as I'll be away from the sewing machine for a few days.

(This post is linked to Off The Wall Friday.)

Heat transfer processes - day 5

The final day! We started out with a review of what everyone had done so far - and there was some wonderful work on show! People felt that having the review in the morning, rather than at the end of the day, helped them figure out what to work on for the rest of the day - whether to follow a particular technique, finish things off, or start thinking about a project that might arise from this course. I ended up doing a bit of each of these.

Rescued from being left behind in the drying cupboard, this easy-peasy screen print was made with strips of newsprint laid down; two screens vertically and one horizontally, with turquoise and black pigments - all done very quickly -

I did some other printing in turquoise (not terribly successful...) and this one was done at the end, to use up the pigment - it could be a book cover "or something"?

These old samples turned up recently - hand stitch from the 90s and a simple but irritating lace pattern knit in icelandic wool, which was purposely shrunken in the washing machine -

They got the foiling treatment -

front - solid foiling, colour pewter

back - using the "skeleton" left from other foiling

Adhesive was added by lightly rolling on with a sponge roller - trying
to avoid getting much on the background; it's pretty much foiled
everywhere, though the camera doesn't pick that up

Another bit of foiling, inspired by seeing the wild work other people had done -

previously screen printed; more light rolling with the sponge roller was added,
and odd bits of foil were overlapped on the stencil-screened areas

This course has made me realise that I'm happiest working with "a system" (or a plan, or an intention) of some sort - and that it's good to be WILD some of the time!

Another bit of finishing up was using phototransfer onto two more colours of linen, to add to the collection of fabrics that might one day turn into something - my working title (or, thinking title) is "Up a Lazy River" - and it will be a long, thin landscape format -

The photocopies I'd brought in finally got painted (in pairs) with various colours of disperse dyes - the newsprint laid underneath the painting looks like it might be an interesting transfer in itself, or cut up first?

Having tried out all the colours available, I had some sheets left over, so I painted one of the pair with a blue and the other with a yellow, then laid them together so the paint mixed, then left them to dry -

turquoise on the left, royal blue on the right ... or was it the other way round?

The colours of the disperse dyes (or of transfer paints) look very different on paper than when they are transferred to cloth - I'm looking forward to trying out a small sample of each, and then writing the colour on the back of the paper. They need to be ironed onto synthetic fabric, and can be cut or torn into shapes. I don't have any ideas for this yet - the challenge is to develop the "travel lines" in yet another way (something wild perhaps?).

The main project for carrying forward uses heat setting and, in these samples, the dye sublimation papers -

satin and other synthetics; top right has been printed on both sides before folding,
others are printed on one or both sides after folding

The fabrics have been folded (and pinned) and pressed. That heat-setting can be done at home with an iron on synthetic fabrics, apparently ... but the papers won't give such strong colours with an iron. Perhaps the strong colours won't be important; the project could take many a different turn...

The working title is "Map Folding" - because even though the creases and configuration are very definite, it's not all that easy to get them back looking as pristine as the original! I envisage these "pages" in a box, a loose sort of book object, able to be lifted out and opened, to see the new configurations of the squares, or just out of curiosity if there's something hidden in the folds [there could be]. Some of the fabrics are stiffer and/or crisper than others - yet the floppiest can spring back into shape most readily. 

To finish, some views of the room in action. We were fortunate to have so much space!

Heat transfer processes - day 4

Agenda: fusing (melting) in the morning, heat-setting (pleats etc) in the afternoon.

Examples of fusing laid out on the table, for inspiration

Temperature 150 degrees, for 15 seconds - though this may vary with the materials. My own efforts, using layers of fruit nets (which seemed to have a will of their own)  onto plastic bags, and a bit of plasticky fabric -

The afternoon was more to my liking - I had an idea, an intention ... and started off with some paper folding -

then did the folding on various types of (synthetic) fabric, adding squares of dye sublimation paper. Temp 180, frying time 2 minutes (for dark colour); for simply heat setting the folds, about 5 seconds is enough.

It's not easy to get the squares flat and in the right places - the heat makes
the paper curl before it can all be held in place

Too many layers of cloth means that any colour underneath will take longer to transfer

Very sheer fabric = rather sheer coloration

The pieces made with satin were satisfying, and also those with the nastiest fabric, which gave nice crisp folds. I'm thinking of these folds in relation to folds in maps - and the difficulty of refolding the maps "right".

Another little something that has possibilities - this is made with the cheapest organza, simply gathered - and coloured green on one side the first time it was in the press, then loosened, turned over and coloured brown -

It had started out a sort of grey colour -

Dawn's slide show included several artists who use fusing and/or heat setting. As part of her "conductive materials project", Berit Greinke uses plastics with wires running through them - embedded conductive materials (via) -

Susan Eyre fuses images onto polystyrene -

Binformation by Susan Eyre (via)

Zane Berzina, Membranes 1 (close-up pix here)

Heat setting is used a lot by various Japanese artists, for example Junichi Arai -

"Tradition and Creation" installation (via)

Wendy Edmonds uses it, along with dye sublimation, in her polar fleece scarves -

Heat transfer processes - day 3

First of all, here's a picture of one of the heat presses - the top plate heats up to the temperature set on the display, and also on the display you can set the time. To put work into the press, you use the black handle to swing the plate aside, then lay the work on the teflon sheet, cover it with another teflon sheet, and pull down the grey handle to lock it in place. When the buzzer goes off, you pull the little black knob beside the handle and lift up the handle, swing the plate aside and take out the work. It's a kind of extreme ironing - but the machines cost about £1K.

The day was about photo transfer, and we'd brought along photos (or scans) printed onto photo transfer paper. I had used a photo of branches dipping into water to make six different colourways, by using the channels in Levels in Photoshop (in a few days, I'll post how this is done). I'd brought along some pale linen to see how the background colour affected the colours of the transfer -

The photos were cut into strips and tried on the various linens, and they all worked quite well - probably because they were such strong and "simple" colours. The only bit really affected by the background was the pale area. 

The phototransfer comes out quite shiny (as on the left below) and a little trick is to put it back in the press, once the paper is peeled off, for a few seconds, to take off some of the shine - can you actually see a difference, or does the angle of the light obscure that? btw the settings for phototransfer are temp 180C, 15 seconds. 

Another thing you can do with the photo transfer paper is to draw on it with oil pastels -

My drawings (based on the branches in the water) are too wispy - in between the lines is the shinyness of the transfer medium. It's better to have nice solid shapes, and cut the paper as close to them as you can.

We also did screenprinting with pigments (in binder). Mixing colours on the screen is something I'd done before, but using flour as a resist was new to me, and doesn't it give a wonderful effect -

The grey might end up as a sky in something sometime, and the other was used immediately as a base for a  photo transfer (with the bits that were left) -

My favourite piece of the day - in fact, a bit of a breakthrough.

Dawn's slideshow of artists who use photo transfer included Natasha Kerr (via) -

Silja Puranen, who prints onto actual carpets -

Paddy Hartley, with uniforms such as these (do go to his website and look closely) -

Shelley Goldsmith's printed children's dresses, an installation called Flood (via) -

Ann Therese Yndestad's bag was used in Dawn's book (via)-

Heather Belcher, printing onto felt -