If I don’t stop I’ll go blind

In a pre­vi­ous post I explained the basics of Lux­og­ra­phy, my dig­i­tal print­mak­ing process. As Spring Open Stu­dios (and the dead­line to get into the cat­a­log for Fall Open Stu­dios) looms ever clos­er, I’m work­ing extra time to fin­ish a few pieces, and that means build­ing new pat­terns to use for screening.

My lat­est vari­a­tion on the theme is to break up the lines into hatched rows, which is how I hatch in pen and ink. The goal con­tin­ues to be to fuse the tech­niques I use in draw­ing with print­mak­ing meth­ods. This here is what I’ve been work­ing on not just all day, but for a num­ber of days over the past cou­ple months. What you see here is a tiny por­tion of the pat­tern, so imag­ine it spread across a 30″ mon­i­tor and you’ll begin to under­stand what I mean about going blind.

As I’ve explained before, these pat­terns are used to sim­u­late gray tones. When posi­tioned over an image, the dark­er regions cre­ate wider lines and the lighter regions cre­ate nar­row ones. To demon­strate I’ve tak­en a pho­to­graph from my 2004 Trea­sure Island Triathlon and applied the line pat­tern in a sin­gle direc­tion. This actu­al­ly is the yel­low chan­nel of a pho­to­graph which has been split into cyan, magen­ta, yel­low and black. The final piece, con­struct­ed just for this demon­stra­tion, has a marked­ly dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter to it.

(For all these images you’ll want to click on the thumb­nail to see a ver­sion that shows off the char­ac­ter of the tex­ture a lit­tle bet­ter than these low-res thumbnails.)

I includ­ed the yel­low as an exam­ple here because the yel­low lines are typ­i­cal­ly the most dif­fi­cult to see in the final image. Hav­ing both of these ver­sions it should be a lit­tle eas­i­er to find the dis­tinct yel­low lines in the four-col­or version.

Now that I’ve fin­ished this screen I get to apply it to some of the image treat­ments I’ve worked up. I also have to get back to work on the spi­ral, which is much more dif­fi­cult to sit in front of for hours on end. The hatch­ing was pret­ty dif­fi­cult but I haven’t been able to work on the spi­ral for more than an hour at a time, and even then when I look away I still see vibrat­ing col­or pat­terns every­where I look. It’s mad­den­ing, so I’ve been lim­it­ing the time I work on the spi­ral. That of course only makes it take longer.