Bonfire Night

Abstract Thursday: Burning Bush

Apologies - I have minutes to upload tonight's entry before I need to rush out.  This is another experiment with Affinity Photo.  I will update properly later to explain what I did!

Later:

So this is what I did ... there was a sort of plan, but I was also prepared to abandon an idea if something started to work well that I hadn't planned for.  I am sure that there are plenty of you out there that are far more expert than me at this sort of stuff, but for those to whom this is all new (and I am still feeling my way) here is the recipe for this shot:

1.  Display a photo you have taken previously on your monitor, full screen - this one is based on this image ;
2. Take a long exposure photo of the monitor while moving the camera around to blur the image (in my case this produced a wonderful Turner-esque image that I was almost prepared to use at that stage - but it was clearly still too much of a landscape);
3. open the photo in your photo editor of choice - in my case affinity but photoshop, gimp or whatever will do as long as you can create layers and apply filters;
4. keep the original image and create a duplicate layer (you can then always start again if it goes to rats);
5. in this case I used affinity's mesh facility to distort the original image, once I was happy with that distorted image I used that as my new base image;
6. create a new layer from this base image and pixelate it (how big the pixels are is up to you, in this case they were very small indeed);
7. sharpen the pixelated layer (in this case I sharpened and resharpened the pixelated layer until it looked as though it was made of tiny blocks of lego);
8. use a blur filter to create the large blocky effect from the pixelate image (as this is overlaying the original image you are looking for a strong effect so that when you "blend" it with the layers below you achieve an interesting result that appeals) - at one stage this started to look as though it might achieve the look of brush strokes in a Van Gogh painting - sadly I didn't manage to achieve that look and ran out of time ;
9. play with the blending of the layers by using the opacity effects in the layers until you find one that works well - n this case, there were several layers, with various opacity effects (multiply, lighten colour, etc).
10. merge your layers to create your finished image.


Hope that helps someone!