Wrapped Communications

Old iron whispers stories through vibrant textures.

DIGITAL ARTTEXTURED PHOTOGRAPHYABSTRACT

Fran

8/3/20242 min read

The photos I took in the countryside continue to inspire and lead to new projects. At my friend's residence, an old amateur radio tower, repurposed for internet reception, caught my eye. As a lover of patterns and geometric shapes, I thought that old iron structure would be perfect for a project. I snapped three pictures of it, framed to the left, center, and right respectively, because in my mind I already knew how I would start my project.

After importing the photos as separate layers, my initial step was to invert the colors and blend them using the 'Lighten Only' blending mode. Then I overlaid two textures that would be crucial for this work: one of a concrete wall with linear imprints from wooden formwork, creating two parallel lines; the other featured a weathered, rusty corrugated metal door. I then rotated both textures to be in the vertical position of the composition.

amateur radio tower
amateur radio tower
concrete texture
concrete texture

To bring the work to life, since the colors were quite gray and dull, I selected at least five wall textures from my pack, choosing the most colorful ones. I won’t show them in this post, but I have used several of them in other works.

At this point, the work looked pretty good, but I wanted to experiment a bit, so I added the texture of a crumpled black nylon bag, the kind used for garbage, and applied the Screen mode, adjusting the levels until I got the desired look.

After exporting the composition, I imported the image into GIMP and applied one of the G’MIC filters to enhance the colors a bit more, thus reaching the final work.

Hours later, I reopened the project and wanted to continue experimenting with more layers of textures, obtaining very surprising results. However, since they are so different from the first one, they deserve their own blog post, which I will share next week. For now, here is “Wrapped Communications”.

Click on the image to enlarge.

amateur radio tower
amateur radio tower
amateur radio tower
amateur radio tower
rusted metal door
rusted metal door
garbage bag texture
garbage bag texture
Texture Attack: Wrapped Communications, digital art by Fran de Souza
Texture Attack: Wrapped Communications, digital art by Fran de Souza