Sunday, September 9, 2012

The making of the "The Girl Next Door"

The Surface Design Association (SDA) Illinios Chapter has opened a Call for Entry for all Midwest SDA members. Email me at darcy@darcyberg for a copy of the prospectus. The name of the show is "Blind Eye". The exhibition's concept: Too often today we see tragic situations that result from the lack of action. This exhibition hopes to explore the destructive results of ignoring a situation or people’s ignorance to thinking everything will be ok when they choose to not get involved in making the world a better place.
 
Alright. Now, what to do...what to do...what to do. Do I develop something about the environment? No. Do I develop something about elderly people? No. I decided that I would do a photo shoot of two little girls running somewhere. Could it be down a road or a lane? And then I had this idea that I would take a shot of a street sign that said "dead end". I could collage the 2 shots in Photoshop. Great plan.


So I contacted a friend and asked her if I could use her two little girls as models. The girls were thrilled with the idea. I was thrilled she agreed to let me use them as models. We went a local park and took about 300 images in various poses. The girls were great! And their mom was happy to act as my assistant. Bonus! As payment I took them all out for ice cream cones and gave their mom images I took of the girls that I thought turned out nice.

As most plans go, after viewing the images that I took I changed my mind about my piece. I selected this shot of one of the girls.


I loved the look on her face and the light bouncing off her hair. Okay, any of you that know me and how I develop my portrait quilts know that I love to work in Photoshop. I began to work my magic. Cropping is the first order of business.

 
What a face! Perfect!

Now on to the sliders for brightness and contrast. Then on to levels. Next to saturation and sharpening. A little use of the dodge and burn tools and I'm off to the next level. 

I have two favorite programs that are third party plug-ins for Photoshop. One of them is Photomatix to produce an HDR (high dynamic range) image. The other is Nix Silver Efex. This program turns color images into a black and white. Voila! Here is my final image.

  
Since the size of the piece has to be 15" by 15", I have to send the piece out to be printed. My printer will print to a width of 13". That's not wide enough. I could have added a border but I considered to be distractive. It has to be the image only. Now you might be thinking, I could have tiled the image and pieced together but I don't like that look. I like a whole cloth piece. So off to Spoonflower she went. Here's the link to Spoonflower: http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome
 
That's all for now. I can't wait to show you how she turned out!

 

4 comments:

  1. You were right about her face, how perfect! What will you do with the image when you get it back from Spoonflower? Will you stitch on it?

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    1. Hi Norma,

      Yes, I will stitch on it. I will be bloging about that step soon. Stay tuned!

      Darcy

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  2. I can't wait to see what you do with this. That expression on her face is a little haunting.

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  3. Very cool. I think I need a few new plug ins to play with! Kathy Downie

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