Net'n Skin Entanglement

For this project, I collaborated with a friend who was willing to be my guinea pig in an experiment. She wanted some "hot" photos, and I wanted to explore a new direction in my work with textures, with skin being the perfect subject. It was a win-win situation.

The idea was to create an abstract piece that played with the shapes of the body, the texture of the skin, and fishnet stockings. The only rule for this "game" was that I would use only images captured during that photo session—no other textures.

The session resulted in nearly 300 photos, and choosing was tough. I started by selecting two shots I had taken with extreme intentional camera movement, and out of focus, already envisioning them as textures.

I then layered several photos on top, sharing only small details here because individually, they might be considered NSFW, which wasn't the intent of this work.

After experimenting with various blending modes, I got a result that was close to what I had in mind. However, the forms were still too explicit and identifiable, and I wanted something more abstract.

So, I rendered that image and started a new project in GIMP, still sticking to the rule of not using external textures. I also didn’t want to keep adding more images from the session, thinking it would be overkill. Instead, I decided to work solely with that image.

First, I duplicated the layer and converted the copy to grayscale. Then, I duplicated the original layer again and applied a pretty extreme posterization effect, which reduced it to just a few patches of color, based on the brightness and tone of the image. Finally, I duplicated that posterized layer and also converted the copy to grayscale. I started applying different blending modes, using Difference for the desaturated layers and Overlay for the color layers. This led me to a result that easily ranks among the most satisfying works I’ve created so far.

Click on the image to enlarge.