Glass brick… No, really :)

Photographing glass bricks is a strange pastime but in this case I had in mind creating something for Sliders Sunday. I’ll copy the original in-camera image so you can revel in its… well… boringness.

First step was to add colour so I gradient mapped a pretty gradient (that is, mapped the various black and white tones to a gradient: Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Corel Painter allow you to do this easily with the latter two being more powerful I think).

See Glass Brick I for the result of this interim stage, which forms the basis for the other three in the set.

The rest is detailed magic (which I’ll summarise below). I thought it looked like a brain, hence the title :)

This set has been gestating for around four weeks. And it was not getting better, so I thought I’d best publish them and move on… Such is creativity: it just doesn’t flow easily sometimes.

Hope you still like them though. Any favourite?

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Sliders Sunday :).

[Handheld in daylight.
Gradient mapped to produce Glass Brick I.
Duplicated layer, flipped horizontally and blended to get a symmetric pattern. Mangled colour to taste.
Rectangular to Polar coordinate conversion to get the globe and the radiating rays.
Normally the rays each are one colour but I thought that was a bit boring so I used and HSL layer to shift the hue and added a radial mask so that it only affected the outer parts of the rays.
Dark blue border with fine white line around the pic, and we’re done.
The original image linked below so you can see how far we came.]

Tags:   colour glass brick gradient map manipulation Sliders Sunday

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Glass brick.

Marbled.

Marbling is a way of processing wet paint images by drawing out colours in wavy lines. The technique was used of old to create the pretty patterns you see in the bookends of antique or fine books.

This image is based on Glass Brick 1 using the marbling tool in Corel Painter, one of those addictive toys that is great fun to play with. This one is based on multiple iterations in various directions.

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image!

PS Depending on your device this is nicer zoomed in : press Z if you wish :)

Tags:   glass brick gradient map manipulation marbling Corel Painter colour

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Glass brick.

Gradient mapped... Well at least it's one way to get the colour in...

This image was intended as the starting point for some more serious messing about, but I quite like it as it is so I thought I would share it :)

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image!

Tags:   glass brick manipulation gradient map colour

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Glass brick.

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image!

[This is based on another marbled version of Glass Brick I (similar to Glass Brick II).
In Affinity Photo I used the perspective tool to make a vertical wedge.
Copied the layer flipped vertically and then blended both layers with each other (using Pin Light I think) against a deep blue background fill layer.
Finally used a 2-mirror distort filter to create the symmetry.
Did you want to know all that? Probably not! ... But it's pretty isn't it? (It looks nicer slightly zoomed so feel free to try pressing Z :)]

Tags:   colour glass brick gradient map manipulation blend modes marbling mirror

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