Part Experiment, Part Accident

Sometimes, happy accidents occur when experimenting. That’s what happened when I came up with this piece. Initially, it started as an experiment. The idea was to put my image on my iPad screen, cover the screen with a sheet of glass, place droplets of cooking oil and fountain pen ink on the glass, mix them, and then blot to make patterns. After that, the image is rephotographed through the glass.

I liked what I came up with, but I thought that perhaps the effect was too strong. For that reason, I decided to try to blend the initial photo back into the result. When I try to do that, I sometimes use the difference blend mode to get things lined up. When I did that with this image….whoa…things turned blue, and where some things lined up, there was black. I could then move that top original photo layer and get all sorts of different effects until I settled on one. Then, a few curves and a LUT or two to bring the colors into a more unified look (I had to make some small areas of green, magenta, and orange colors back to blue).

Sometimes, when there is a happy accident, you have to run with it.

By the way, if you are reading this on my website and not getting the post via email, you probably notice some weird formatting changes. That is because of a surprise reveal that I am working on, but it won’t be ready for a couple of weeks!

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