Still Lifes IV
I tend to avoid drawing
plants other than flowers, primarily because I hate the color
green. See, if you measure out a rainbow in which the colors
change in perfectly paced increments, you'll find that green
takes up way more than its fair share of the spectrum. And it's
not just that we use the same word to describe too many different
colors of green—the colors are actually indistinguishable to
the human eye. I mean, if you take pure red and add 1% yellow to
it, it will look different. But if you take pure green you'll
have to add about 50% yellow to it before you'll even begin to
see the slightest change. It really annoys me. But for this
picture, which is mostly just a drastically edited photograph, I
did bring myself to depict some greenery—and I even used a
little green to do it with. The original photograph was entirely
green, though—a dark hideous green-bean-colored green—so
I got to indulge in the thrill of eliminating huge portions of
green from my computer screen as I worked.
I like this one mainly
because it looks a bit like it was drawn in crayon. I actually
made it by morphing one of my predrawn rainbows, and then I
achieved the crayon-like texture by repeatedly halving the
saturation and doubling the contrast. I'm not quite sure why this
process created white lines in such fortuitous places (the glow
around the sun, snow on a purple mountain, and froth on the
rainbow-colored ocean) but when luck like that comes my way, I
believe in accepting it graciously.
This picture is little more
than a collage. I simply cut out the embroidered flower, pasted
it on the lace background, and colored the whole thing in.
A mood picture, obviously. I
hardly feel I have the right to say I created this
picture—it feels more like I just found it on my
computer screen. I was just playing around, smudging my colors
for the fun of it, and after a while I noticed some smudges that
I thought were interesting, so I decided to try some symmetrical
effects on them. When I copied the smudge symmetrically from left
to right, suddenly I saw a person in it! I decided it was too
good to waste. The person's raised arms and upturned chin told me
that the background was fire, so I adjusted the color accordingly,
smudged it a bit more to lessen the symmetry, and the picture was
complete. It's one of the easiest pictures I've ever done.
© 1999, 2000 by QueerByChoice. All rights reserved.