November 26-27, 2003 – My creative process

I've been playing with old never-amounted-to-much images lately. I found this one in my December 2000 parameter file and decided to see if I could make anything out of it.





I couldn't see what was happening there in all that darkness, so I zoomed out and started working with the gradients on the four original layers.





I really liked the blues, but somehow in the course of adding some layers and further tweaking the gradients, I ended up here:





In this version of 6 layers + 1 mask, I decided to try some different crops and then to focus on a limited palette of warm hues:





I really liked the one above (and still do), but it had much less texture than I normally use so I decided to add some just for fun. Unfortunately, it flattened out the depth I'd achieved in the smoother version:





So I decided to pursue the flat look, but with a different palette. After adding 5 new layers and 2 new masks, the image started to get a watercolor-like look that I liked:





While the blue-green one was rendering to disk, I played with each of the layers, added two more masks to help control color and somehow landed here:





The render of the one above looked too texture-heavy and the Mandies in the background were too pronounced so I softened each:





Softening the Mandies made the reds less saturated and rust-colored, so I decided to aim for deeper reds again. I deleted a couple of layers and ended up with this much more vivid version (which I also cropped so that the swoopy leads right into the top right corner):





I'm undecided about how much of the flowery spiral on the right to show, so I cropped the above version a bit more. Now I've got to live with the one above and this one below to see which image has the best composition.





Just for fun (and because I cannot leave well enough alone), I zoomed back out again. I like the contrast that the extra blue areas provide, and the composition of the straight line and area to its left, but I miss the more unusual composition of the zooms above.





After all this, I put the image away for awhile and then several weeks later worked on it again. Here is the final result.

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