Frosty Consequences

Pat supplied this lovely image for us.

Our latest round of Consequences whizzed round the group without a hitch. There were some lovely images created, and some of us had trouble working out what to do with them as we liked them just the way they were. But that is not the name of the game, so we carried on making our changes and passing the images along. Once again it was amusing to see how often we almost reversed a transformation done by the previous person, without of course knowing that we were doing so. Pat had suggested that we retain the "frostiness" in our manipulations. This was very hard to achieve, particularly as we got further in to the game. Occasionally we threw the frostiness out of the window in favour of something summery or just plain lovely, but distinctly warm. At other times we managed to drag back a bit of winteriness, whether that was frosty or not is open to interpretation!

As we have 2 new members to the group (Welcome Jenny and Lesley), we decided it would be too time consuming to replicate everything on the computer so we worked through the A4 sheets without the aid of the computer, but we made notes of things people were unclear about or wanted to see demonstrated. After all the images had been considered and we had our long list of things to explore, the computer was turned on and we demonstrated (fumbled and bumbled) our way through the queries so that everyone was clear (!) about how things had been achieved. This was a much more efficient way of working, and concentrated the mind and exercised the brain cells all afternoon.

Rather than posting everything to the blog this time, we thought that we would upload the images to Picasa Web Albums and everyone can see in more detail the progression of each image. There are currently 3 peoples work to link to, but hopefully we will have every one's up and running very soon.

Go check out Erica's transformations: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/EricaMThomson/DotFrostA4Sheets#



Ros's Transformations: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/roswillis58/FrostConsequences?authkey=Gv1sRgCNHQ5JCzm6j_ggE&feat=email#



Liz's Transformations: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/lizziewelch01/DOTConsequencesFrosty#

When everyone has posted their images we will need to gather them together into the right "stories", but in the mean time you can follow each story by looking at the Web albums in the following order: Pat, Erica, Lesley, Liz, Jenny, Ros, Hilary. Start with one persons image (eg Frosty_Liz) and move to Jenny's web album (when it is up) and find Frosty_Liz_Jenny, then to Ros's web album and find Frosty_Liz_Jenny_Ros, and so on. If you do this for all 7 starting images, you can see that there are 49 A4 sheets with iterations on, and that is a lot of information - too much to put up on the blog in full.

The image below is the final iteration of my starting image, and as you can see, there is nothing recognisable left of the starting image, but having been transformed into bright colours at one stage of the game, it was dragged back into the appropriate winter season to finish up as a snowflake - most appropriate.

The Consequences of Experimentation

Having concluded another round of Consequences we are beginning to upload the images that tell the story of the Temple picture that Hilary provided for us to play with.

As before with Cactus Consequences, we each started off with the same image (this time the temple above), and made some adjustments before passing it on to the next person in the group.

No one knew exactly how the image that they then received had been manipulated, all they could do was set to work on the received image before passing it on again.

We each kept a record of what we had done to every image we received and passed on. Then at our meeting in August at Pat's house we produced our A4 record sheets and worked through an image from the original through all of it's iterations to it's conclusion. Using a laptop and Photoshop Elements 2 to show how each iteration was produced.

This way of working kept us all involved and learning. Everyone picked up new things to try out, but we also learnt that we needed to keep better records of what we did!

Below is the story of my temple image. Pat's final manipulation was quite spectacular.

One of the consequences of this exercise is that for our next round of the game we are going to try and retain the essence of the original image. It is so very easy to allow the software to create wonderful manipulations, but they often move so far away from the original inspiration that we loose control over the design process. So our challenge for the next round is to try to hang on to some morsel of the appeal of the original image and hopefully end up with some images that we might use as inspiration for stitch: whether they are the final images or steps along the way.

Cactus Consequences

Cactus Consequences was it a game, or was it a challenge? We all started off with the same image (above), a beautiful picture of a cactus taken by Erica at Wisley. Everyone then had to make some sort of transformation to it and pass it on to the next person on the list of members. The image had a restricted size of 1mb and was to be about 10cm sq, approx 150ppi. The reason for the restriction is that not everyone in the group is on broadband (download times etc).

We each recorded what we did to the image, and sent it on as a single layered jpeg so no one could see the previous transformations and be influenced by them. Each week we passed on the images, but it soon became apparent that not everyone was sticking to the rules of engagement! We had some very interesting shpaes and sizes of image and quite a range of file formats too, which made it a little tricky for some to bring the image back in to line! It all added to the challenge though, and I think we all learnt more about how to change file sizes, ppi/dpi, layers and their implication for file sizes, and also keeping records and naming layers.

Below is my record of a transformation I made to one of the images.

Everyone had kept some sort of record of what they did and we followed one image around the group as it was transformed again and again. Whenever an image got to Erica it seemed to turn green! Chrissie was excellent at creating unusual shapes, Pat was in to pattern and Ros was keen to try out something new each time.

By listening and trying out peoples transformations on Ericas computer we all learnt things we did not know before. In fact I think we all had information overload as well!

Hopefully we will all post an image of the stages that transformed each one of our starting images into the end images that we received as they finished going around the group. Mine is still travelling at this point, but I hope to have the finished one back soon.

I am looking forward to the next one, Hilary has kindly supplied us all with another image to work on.

Thanks Erica for being our host this time, and thank you too for your origami skills!