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.