Color Me Mud

Sometimes I post B&W photos colored in Photoshop. One such brought comments about the suitability of that process.

I’ve always admired false-color images of one kind or another, where colors are added to electron photomicrographs, MRI’s, heat images, radar returns, etc. Natural colors have a certain naive charm, but most of the time nature needs a little help.

My colors are not as harmonious as those of old pals like Gauguin or Matisse. My style derives from the comics: large areas of flat color separated by borders breaking the image along lines of anatomy or landscape.

BJS suggested he’d “like to see more blues than reds.”

Thinking it over, I guess I just plain like red and its relatives. (Purple, violet, pink, orange, brown...) Maybe it’s a humanist kind of thing, because if you look at people, inside or out, there’s almost nothing blue about them.

EC: “I dig the colour scheme, and I especially like what it’s done to the mud.”

Mud’s wonderful stuff, but hard to photograph in a way that shows its worth. I’d like to make it look like a folded duvet or crushed velvet. Mud makes great building material when dried and/or baked – easy to work with, and there’s never a shortage. The next step up from the stone age should be called the Age of Mud, but I guess that doesn’t sound so hot as the title of a book. Still, there it is, midway between the stone age and the bronze age. Mud is good.