Subconscious Tapestry

At the threshold of nightmares: would you wake up, or dive into it?

DIGITAL ARTTEXTURED PHOTOGRAPHYABSTRACT

Fran

8/31/20242 min read

These past few days have been hectic, with various personal matters demanding my attention, leaving me little time to focus on the projects I had been working on.

For this piece, I began with a photo of twisted, rusty wires from an old, abandoned fence in the countryside, next to a stone wall.

The tangled shape of the wire inspired me to take this project in a more mysterious and unsettling direction. To achieve this, I chose textures that were quite different from each other, hoping that the interplay of such contrasting patterns would create the effect I was aiming for.

vegetal texture
vegetal texture

Initially, things weren’t going as planned. I had a mountain of layers and was struggling to find the right combinations to achieve the desired effect.

rusted wire
rusted wire
lichen texture
lichen texture
wire texture
wire texture
wood texture
wood texture
screen cap layers panel GIMP
screen cap layers panel GIMP

I experimented by changing the order of the layers, duplicating some, applying different blending modes, adjusting the hue and levels, and even deactivating some layers intermittently. I also used several auxiliary textures to enhance the color, including these:

red wall texture
red wall texture
red wood texture
red wood texture
intermediate stage 1
intermediate stage 1
intermediate state 2
intermediate state 2

These adjustments started to yield some interesting results, each one vastly different from the other, like these two:

While intriguing, I wasn’t completely satisfied, so I continued experimenting. After some time, I reached the final result: an image with depth, filled with patterns, likely to induce pareidolia, and for me, very much in tune with the feelings I have when my dreams are on the verge of becoming nightmares. I created two versions of this work, one more saturated and the other more somber.

Click on the images to enlarge.