gimp

Of late I've been trying to take more photos of the country I live in. After 12+ years of living here, and coming from a place like India that is infinitely more visually chaotic, it becomes a bit of an effort to keep boredom from setting in. I can't say I'm taking better photos here now than perhaps I ever did, and I still yearn for a place that isn't just desert and buildings and malls, but I'm trying.

Recently I finally looked into this whole cross-processing look I've always liked, and how to introduce them into my own photos. After appying the knowledge of a few tutorials and a couple of GIMP plugins and scripts (including my favourite GEGL C2G method) I've come up with these.

They're all a bit over the top -- nobody said Indians were subtle and I am, in that regard at least, 100% desi -- but I do like the strangeness the techniques bring to otherwise bland, brown and grey photos of the UAE. Here's six more examples.

It's been a while since I just did something for the heck of it. Designers usually like to make such work sound important by labeling it a 'personal project', but I like to think of it more like a sketch or drawing practice -- a Design Doodle!

This piece resulted from a process that is the essence of doodling. There was no plan, no idea, no concept in my head. I simply looked through a random folder of photos I'd taken, picked one, cross-processed it in the GIMP until it looked nice, then imported it into inkscape and went from there. After about an hour of work on it there was a 'click' in my head that said it was done, and that was that.

It was stream-of-consciousness design!

I hope to do more of these, probably one a week, maybe more. It always helps to keep practicing, to keep the gears of your mind charged, and client work or large projects can sometimes be too serious for that. It also feels great to start and finish something in one sitting.

Go out and play, just spend and hour doing 'nothing' -- and you may end up with something you like very much.

V

I mentioned in a previous Black & White photo post that while I love the aesthetic I'd never done much of it, i.e. I'd never bothered to process my (colour) digital pictures into adequate black & white photos. But now that I've hit upon a method whose results I like, expect a lot more black & white posts on this blog!

Today I'm presenting 5 shots taken mostly during my last India trip (except the first, which was taken in Khor Fakkan). I hope you like 'em, and if you'd like to find out how I did them, do check back here in a few days when I'll put up a tutorial on how to convert images to B&W using the GIMP. (You can follow the site's RSS feed, and me on twitter).

This pic is both in Sketch Machine and Illustration because it started off as a pencil sketch in my little notebook, and by the time it was done I figured I might as well colour it up in the GIMP.