Skeleton Key

Part of the fun of digital imaging is the ability to create rapidly the sort of variations on a theme that would take many days of work, frustration, and false starts using traditional printmaking methods. The key to this is mastering the simple but powerful concept – originated (I think) in Photoshop but used now in all image-editing software – of blending multiple "layers". A case in point: a few days ago, some noodling around resulted in the picture above. It's a sort of cross between an autumnal and a Pentecostal mood: rushing wind, flames, drifting smoke, that sort thing, and the sort of mildly OTT place I often end up when improvising. I liked the combination of elements enough to dial it back a bit and play around, dropping things in and out, changing blend modes, and so on. FWIW, here are a few of the results so far:

And where did it all start, I hear you ask? Not with the tree, as it happens, but here:

A photo from the late lamented university Valley Garden greenhouses taken in December 2006, which became this:

I can't even remember, now, quite why I felt the need to make a pattern from a skeleton leaf  in the first place, but whatever the original stimulus it has ended up serving as the key to and the armature underlying several rounds of improvisational picture-making. Here's a final sample from a completely different direction of travel to the ones above:

It reminds me strongly of a particular summer night, many years ago. Such a night ... Sweet confusion under the moonlight... But who'd have guessed, back then, what magic would become available to us, to conjure substance out of airy nothing?

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, scene 1