As A Tapestry Grows

I shared some photos last week of one of my favorite wildflowers. In doing that, I really had no intention of anything other than sharing some inspiration. But living with those images and seeing them together on one page began to haunt me. 

Then later in the week, while putting together some of the content for the upcoming Elements class, it got me thinking what a good example of Shape in tapestry this image could be. 

And that led me to playing around with Photoshop …

I began by printing out one of my favorites from the group. 

I adjusted the image by changing it to black and white and printed that out, too. 

Black and White rendition

Then I went back to the original color image and converted it to Posterized.

Posterized

This is where it started getting fun.

I again went back to the original color image (this is important because the effect will be different adding filters on top of other filters) and converted to Gradient Map, followed by Shadows/Highlights.

Gradient Map

Shadows/Highlights

As much as I loved the black and white version of the original, I knew the posterized or the gradient were more “weaverly”.  In the end, I chose the posterized because of the emphasis on the light dots.

Next, I needed to consider size. It was too small to weave at 8” if I was going to emphasize shapes. (Yes, I could make those dots in Soumak, but that wasn’t the plan, wrong class!) I had a loom already warped at 8 EPI and about 16 inches wide… plus it would be easy to enlarge at that size, so that’s what I did.

I share my steps with you here in case any of this might be of interest. 

First, I resized the image to 16”  - then I set up guides to break the vertical and the horizontal in half which would allow me to print each section.

Then one by one, I cropped each section and printed them out. That extra horizontal guide was so that I could overlap the vertical pieces to line up. I could have done that with the vertical guide, too, but didn’t.

Image cropped to isolate upper right.

Next step was piecing them together and tracing the shapes. Using a lightbox, I traced the shapes (values), simplifying some and marking light, medium, or dark.

Tracing from photograph (those extra lines connecting the dots were just my way of working out the spiral).

Not too bad for a day’s work!

I’ve written several posts on using Photoshop in designing tapestries. My methods are very basic. If you’re really interested in diving into it, check out Mary Lane’s work. Her approach is much more sophisticated than mine! She describes in detail her process for one of her pieces, Wander, here. Lots of other gems on her site, too!

Do you use photos or a photo editing program in your work? I’d love to hear your process!