For years I have been taking pictures of objects which have interesting texture or which have promising ideas in it to work with. Drawing is a way of developing visual ideas, but pictures can also give interesting ideas. I selected a couple of pictures and played around with in either in Photoshop Elements or in Picasa.
This first picture is a close up of a silk hydrangea flower:
I manipulated this picture and reduced it in size. The result is a repetition of the design which would not look bad on a big piece of fabric:
This is the original picture of a tree. I really liked the pattern/texture of the bark:
After some manipulations in Adobe I decided to use these 4 different images of how this tree could be altered. The texture of the bark is still there, only it looks different:
This is the original picture of a pile of chopped wood:
And this is how the wood blocks look after some alterations:
I especially like the 2 on the top row. The left one because of the flowing 'watery' look which does not rhyme with wood, but give a feeling of movement. The right one would look interesting on black fabric with white stitching. A rather abstract image of something plain and ordinary as wood blocks.
This picture is a close up of a plant:
By altering the picture I could give more emphasis on the separate stems (top row left) by outlining them with a dark color. The one on the right top row gives an unreal effect because of the use of blue.
The one at the left bottom row is not altered much, it is a close up of a close up. This way you see less that it is a plant, it gives more an impression of a bunch of crossing lines. Might be interesting enough to explore this idea of crossing lines more in depth. And in the last one on the right the separate stems are 'melted' together, changing this way from lines into shapes.
