Last week I began to play around with my photographs of the New Forest in Photoshop. I started off with creating some photo montages of the landscape shots and the close-up texture shots; layering them together.MontagesI quite like the fantasy world effect that this gives my photos. These would have looked really interesting as a double exposure image on film.

I also used Photoshop to extract pieces of negative space from my images. I wanted to do this as a way of focusing on smaller spaces, with new sets of lines that I may have missed from the bigger picture.

I became very interested in the shapes that came up from these exercises. I particularly liked the rough edges and how these looked like the edges of some of the bark textures that I also photographed.

For my next lot of steel experiments, I decided to take some of the negative space shapes, and simplify them and then cut these shapes out of textured steel sheet.

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I then used the fly press to form a curve in these shapes, and played around with the arrangement of them to assemble larger forms.

I have become quite taken with this idea of assembling a form together from a selection of shapes and components. It would be interesting to experiment with a combination of more than one metal or different types of textures.

 

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This week I have began to look at other ways of creating texture, and have tried out a few bronze castings from collected bark pieces.

Watch this space for an update!