Scanned Images

The following images are the photographs I produced with scanned in elements. I scanned in various materials but in the end used this image of fabric based wrapping up paper. I began to experiment with placing the material onto skin. I thought this would carry on from the eerie look I created in the image above, It would in the same way play around with the way the skin and the face ordinarily looks, and the confusing and strange way it looks after being manipulated.

Here, the layering of the scanned image brings connotations of plague, skin so transparent you can see the veins and, on a more positive interpretation, Indian henna art. To overcome the ambiguity of what the effect looks like I re-created the same effect on a slightly different image, a photograph of the same subject but with dead-looking, half open eyes. This enhanced the odd, eerie, plagued feeling.


To create both these images I first selected the visible skin and created another layer for it, I then deleted the visible skin from the background. I then added another layer consisting of the scanned in material. I placed the material layer at the bottom, then the original background and then the layers of visible skin. I was then able to change the opacity of the skin layers so that the material was visible through it. I had different layers for face and arms because the intensity of the material shinning through needed to be different on each area of the body. When happy with the image I de-saturated it, to emphasise the eerie plagued feeling.





With this image I used the same material, however, this time I placed the material over the image and enlarged it so that the pattern was easily visible. I then cut out the background of the material, leaving only the pattern. To give an illustrated effect I repeatedly used the Gaussian blur tool on small parts of the subject’s face. I am not very happy with this image; the pattern looks very alien from the original image. It may have helped if I had kept the subject in colour.