I’ve come to the conclusion…

that scanning is boring. [Like this post, which goes on a bit.]

Scanning is especially dull if, like me, you have to scan everything 4 times.

I was feeling idle last night  so I played with PostworkShop – quite the easiest way I know  to produce interesting manipulated photos – on these two images.

 

Yes, litter photos again. I bet readers who’ve been with me a while are missing the flowers.

 

I applied ‘white sketch’ to the images,

 

 

 

 

 

then printed them on calico, previously painted with Inkaid, and collaged with the backs of envelopes. As you do.

Today I scanned them

Once as a colour image.

 

 

 

Once in grey scale.

 

 

 

 

 

Once in black and white.

 

 

 

 

 

And once in inverted colours. 

Boring process, interesting results.

 

 

 

 

Then I did the same for the other four pairs of images I printed off last night.

Don’t worry, I'm not going to show you all of them. Just the first scans – to prove that I do eventually  use the fabrics and papers I prepare for printing.

‘Sketchy marker’ on emulsion painted junk mail – for the flower lovers out there, the left image is of daffodils. The right one isn’t.

 

 

 

My own combination of filters [known as ‘plasmaxor’] on a bit of old curtain painted with clear Inkaid. The daffodils are a bit more obvious here.

 

 

 

‘Abstract 1’ on the left, and ‘antique drawing’ on the right, on calico painted with Printability and collaged with brown paper.

 

 

And my favourites – the ‘kitchen garden’ filter [I kid you not] on heavy but not pelmet weight Vilene, painted with moulding paste and Inkaid, a recipe from ‘Digital Art Studio’. It has a wonderful crunchy texture, which the scan doesn’t show, but which works really well with the images.

And if you decide to try it and put the result though your printer – on your own head be it.

The I did some more scanning.

When my mum died, I inherited a lot of transfers. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have binned the lot – but when did I have an ounce of sense? I am not really a transfer person – all the designs seem to involve satin stitch, probably my least favourite stitch after cross stitch [one because it’s boring, the other because I’m useless at it]. In any case, the transfers don’t work very well, probably because many of them are even older than I am.

But I have a vague idea of adding floral transfer images to some of the litter photos – and perhaps even embroidering them – so I decided to scan them.

I’d only need to scan each one once, wouldn’t I?

Wrong. I couldn’t decide whether I liked the colour image or the black and white image best.

I managed a few before terminal boredom got to me.

This post is going on a bit , so I won’t write about our afternoon out at the Hillier Gardens.

I’ll just show you.