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08 September 2022 @ 03:06 pm

Sunshine Challenge 2022 #7 (Opal) - part six

Prompt #7: Opal

It was in the middle of January 2021 when I decided to see what would happen when I greyed and then tinted the “feathers”, and after that pushed the contrast. Which exact variant I started with is not quite clear; but, at each stage, I ran the result around the colour wheel using GRSites.com’s doohickey. At any rate, this is more or less how it went:

It’s fair to say that the result is unpromisingly lurid.

On the other hand, the “feathers” unexpectedly POP! into an illusion of three-dimensionality. This comes from the fact that two different areas of the original graphic—dark and coloured—have coalesced into a broad area of variably dark blue, running through which is a narrow strip in much lighter version of the same hue. It is this sequence of dark, mid, and pale zones that “lifts” it into 3D.

What I now needed to do was tame it.

One answer was to mute all the colours somewhat and some rather more than that, using desaturation and filters. If the graphic to be tweaked and the filter(s) are chosen carefully, it is possible to preserve the multi-coloured effect:

Or the stronger application of a filter can produce a subtly complex combination of shades with one hue dominant:

Taking the technique further, the use of filters upon filters can also create new combinations with myriad hues, as in this example:

Most productively though, that this technique can be used to make bicolour(ish) variants with a “chunky” texture that have striking "3-D" feathered zones. With relatively minor manipulations, it is sometimes possible to produce quite a range of variants that are clearly related to one another yet significantly distinctive. The examples below all have warm-toned feathers in the purple/lilac/pink range, and cool-toned “V”s in the indigo/blue/turquoise range.

These three, on the other hand, are different combinations of orange and green:

Taking it a step further, techniques that have been discussed in previous posts can also be applied to “chunky” variants. Here, contrastive filters have been used to mute and pale the “V” in the pattern.

It should be noted that the “V” in these examples, though muted, has not been paled entirely. This can be done; but, when such graphics are tiled, the result is a highly contrastive grid of bright little white triangles, which I think looks weird.

An alternative, of course, is to mute not the “V”but the “feathers”—perhaps all the way to grey (or beige).

Before I go any further (and there is further to go!), I would like to point out that several of these variants have a sort of pale—or occasionally dark—halo around the feathering. This is also a muted area, but not of the feathers themselves. Instead, the effect has spread to the contrastive colour outside, though leaving the “V” unaffected. Through the manipulation of filters, contrast, and saturation, this halo can itself become retinted. Especially when the feathers are dark, the effect can be quite striking. Here are two examples:

Now you may be wondering what more changes I could possibly make. Well, when I gave examples of muting the “V” area, I only included instances where it was greyed to pale. As I demonstrated in Opal Post #3, if filters are applied to dark colours (such as blue, purple, and red), then muting makes them go quite dark, sometimes nearly black.

Furthermore, it is possible to use contrastive filters (and so on) on both sections of the graphic:

When both the “V” and the feathers are darkened, the result is a sort of chunky two-toned black-on-black.

*****

I’m going to finish up this page with a selection of “chunky” 3D-looking bicoloured variants. They can be made in quite a wide range of combinations: