Sunshine Challenge 2022 #5 (Bloodstone)

[greerwatson]

Prompt 5: Bloodstone

Since bloodstone is coloured in patches of red and green, this post is going to be the first to actually focus on bicoloured graphics. However, I have to admit that—given the colour combination—I actually think of this as "the Christmas collection". In fact, it was actually in December 2012 that I first started trying to create red-and-green variants of brown128.jpg.

As you can see the first attempts weren't all that great:



Here are some examples of the sort of changes that I tried on the red(dish) one with the green markings. Clearly it needed to be brighter: the first example below, therefore, has had the saturation of the colour increased. However, it still has a rather yellow cast: the red is rusty in tone, and the green is olive-tinted. In the second example, a filter was used to reduce this, resulting in "purer" colours. The last one takes things in a different direction, lightening the graphic and increasing the contrast so that lines of yellow and chartreuse start to appear.



Here are examples of similar changes I tried on the other graphic, the dark green one with crimson highlights. The middle one actually has quite a good "leaf" effect, if the leaf is some sort of tropical thing with red veins. However, it's not exactly Christmassy. Now if I only wrote fic with a jungle setting....



I've refined these graphics quite a bit since then, as well as producing red-and-green variations from other lines of development. I suspect that, having seen the examples above, you may recognize the ancient history of some of the ones here:



The joke is that the best of these have been made fairly recently; and, as I've written few Christmas fic in the past years (even for Yuletide), so far I haven't actually used any of them on my website.




Previous Days:
Prompts #1 and #2 (Amber and Topaz)
Prompt #2 (Rose Quartz)
Prompt #3 (Garnet)
Prompts #3 and #4 (Moonstone and Hematite)
Prompt #4 (Kyanite)
Prompt #5 (Peridot)