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.
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