When making my monoprints, I’m usually using 9x12 drawing paper, which is larger than my 8x10 Gelli plate, so there are often empty white spaces here and there on the paper which I don’t particularly care for (as you can see in the first photo). What to do?
When I bring the print into the computer (either by photographing it or scanning it), I can crop the monoprint so that the white areas off to the sides don’t show. But I can also use a Photoshop technique called “Content Aware Fill,” and Photoshop will arbitrarily fill in those white areas using the surrounding pixels of color as its guide, as you can see in the second photo.
If you’ve never used “Content Aware Fill” in Photoshop, look it up! It’s an easy and useful tool that I use all the time, so much so that I created an action for it which enables me to simply select where I want the effect to appear, click the action, and hoo ha!
But back to the monoprint. I don’t think it’s all that wonderful, frankly, as it stands, but I may make an envelope out of the physical print and it’ll look pretty good. As a framed physical print? Nope. It’s not interesting enough to me. But wait!
In the computer, using Photoshop, I cropped the image down to a square format and added some circles (third photo). Okay, now that’s better. This is worthy of sending off to Fine Art America for sale. But there’s even more.
Using Photoshop, I copied my original layer, flipped it, and applying two different blending modes created the two zig-zag versions you see in the last two photos. Not bad. And they could even be sold as a series along with the one with the circles. They would also look good as throw pillows, don't you think?
So there you have a peek into my little world, where I’m using paint, glue, scissors as well as computer technology to bring everything together. And you wonder what I do with my time? Well, this is a big part of it.
©Carol Leigh
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