"Savoy" is up for scoring on Threadless

A while ago I saw a Savoy cabbage for the first time, and fell in love with the pattern on it's leaves. Succulent veins webbed across this vegetable creating deep enclaves of darkness that seemed to tunnel into eternity. And it was green--a fresh, spring green that I absolutely love! My immediate reaction was to reach for the camera.

Initially with this image I did some basic editing to enhance the color, lighting and sharpness. After that, I inverted the colors, which not only turned the yellow-green into a soft purple, but turned bulging veins into chasms and bottomless depths into mountainous peaks. Suddenly it became some other-worldly canyon.

I tweaked the lighting a bit more then desaturated the color, colorizing various copies with turquoise and deep red. From there, I played around with various filters, my favorite ending up the plastic wrapped effect. Looks rather like a close up of some ruby colored reptile, don't you think?

I may yet use this particular image, but as I've developed an interest in repeating patterns, I had to mirror it on itself to create one. Once again I desaturated the image, then colorized it in a variety of hues. They were nice, but with the intracacies of the texture minimized, it needed something more. When I used the color blending mode to add a reflected gradient, I felt I'd found the secret ingredient to give it that BAM! factor.

I'm not really sure how to describe the flavor of the overall design. Something about it looks tribal to me, as if it's a carving, perhaps from an area in the South Pacific or Southeastern Asia. If you have other impressions, please comment and share!

Anyway, the gods at Threadless.com had deigned to accept this design for scoring by their community (from now through the morning of April 25, 2014), and perhaps even consider it for printing. If you have an account there, please take a moment to score it and perhaps leave a comment. If you're not familiar with Threadless, do visit and browse their many designs on shirts and other products.

Now I really ought to find out how a Savoy cabbage tastes.

Thanks for visiting and please come again!

Variations on a Theme

Since I've spent most of my time these last couple of months researching the where's and how's of putting this blog together, I've not spent very much time actually working on art. I thought for this post I'd talk about a design--or rather, several designs--I made earlier, all from a single, seemingly boring, picture.

Here's the original:

These are roof shingles on a garage that accompanied a house built in a Neo-Victorian style. I liked their shape, the subtle color variations and how they all tied together with sturdy black outlines. Not quite so boring when you take time absorb the details. And while it didn't show up very well in the original image, these shingles were bathed in sunlight and reflecting it in their textured surface.

One of the first things I did once I got this shot into Photoshop was to turn up the color saturation and WOW did it pop! Blues, greens, yellows, and reds materialized as if chips of colored glass had suddenly been scattered, melted and fused.

From there I shifted the hues and distorted the shapes, playing like a child with Play-Doh.




Something about this image kept pulling me back, and these are among those that followed:




... and even this, where I pieced together copies of a distortion to make this lovely tile.

I feel the rich detail gets somewhat lost in this last one, given the diminished size and the attention drawn by the overall pattern, so I may have to return to it one day and pull out a portion to put in the spotlight.

In the meantime, too many other ideas beckon...

Thanks for visiting and please come again!

(By the way, the last four designs here (hover mouse over the images for titles)–"Stained Glass Vortex," "Throb," "Chasing Tails," and "Kaleidoscope in Pink"–are all available on many products at nharveyart on zazzle.  "Chasing Tails" is also available as "Swirling Seas" in which the design is predominantly blues and greens.)