Still Lifes V
This is a marble. I'm quite
fond of it too, partly because I just really like marbles—I
figure if I have enough I'll be less likely to lose them all—and
partly because I made it out of a real rainbow that had spent its
whole life in the sky until I took it down and coiled it into my
marble. (It wouldn't have lasted much longer on the sky anyway;
rainbows don't live long in the wild.) The shadowy lines in it,
by the way, are the remains of one of those oil towers you see
all along the skyline whenever you drive beyond the city limits.
It happened to be in the photograph with the rainbow, and I
thought the shadowy lines made the marble more interesting.
I did very little with the
texture here—I just cut the picture out of a larger one,
changed its dimensions a little, and colored it in. But I think I
did a great job with the colors.
I started this one just by
drawing straight lines, but once I applied the effect that curved
all the lines into the center, the picture took on a life of its
own. It looks three-dimensional, doesn't it? Like a big domed
ceiling with a crystal chandelier in the middle. I also think of
it as a kind of stylized firework, which is why I added the smoke.
Anyway, it's pretty—and it didn't take me long at all.
This picture is from June 2000. It started out as a
photograph of a piece of white lace lying on a black table. First
I applied a Photoshop plugin called Lacquer (made by Sandwater)
to achieve the shiny, lacquered effect. This plugin turned the
black table grey, and then I drastically increased the saturation
and came up with a bluish table and golden highlights in the
flowers. The biggest problem was that the original photograph had
been through some bad JPEG compression, so that when I increased
the saturation the table had all kinds of ugly looking squares of
different shades of blue. When I tried to blur them I kept
accidentally blurring things I didn't want blurred, so eventually
I just took the whole thing into the primitive Windows Paint
program and just colored the table by hand to achieve the solid
shade of blue that I wanted.
© 1999- 2004 by QueerByChoice. All rights reserved.