Rima Koleilat has issued another challenge for anyone to play the game of changing an image. Details are here. So I have taken up playing this game too. Here is my first image – with a tip of the hat to Aldous Huxley (who wrote “Doors of Perception”).

Doors of Reflection, Digital © Diane Clancy

Part of the game is sharing how you got from the original (see Rima’s post) to the final image. I decided to start out in Studio Artist. As before, I started with Translating the image – which moves it in the direction you pull and then doubles as one moves. Because I wanted to keep a sense of realism, while adding mystery and a sense of otherworldliness at the same time, I only pulled in one direction at a time.

After pulling left to right horizontally, I Translated downward vertically. I wanted to continue this process but as I tried it, I was losing the main elements of the image that I wanted to keep. So I used Scale Uniform to just make everything smaller to give me room to fool around.

Then I Translated from right to left to double the door and and Translated from top to bottom to add to the upper stories. After that, I Translated from bottom to top to double the shop and doors to deepen the sense of mystery established with the doubled sign on the shop awning.

I wanted to differentiate the bottom shop and doors from the top to make it look like a reflection. I made a selection in Studio Artist to choose just the bottom reflections and was struck by the striking nature of the inverse color that showed up as I was highlighting it.

I couldn’t figure out how to make things work from there in Studio Artist so I switched to Photoshop since I know certain things much better in that program. Again, I choose just the bottom reflection and tried a few things like watercolor filters and such. But that inverse color was stuck in my mind. So I did a simple inverting the color in the reflection part.

There is an article that I have written about “Art that Changed Me” – it is the topic of the current and next issue of the People’s Voice which is a local newsletter of which I am the editor. There wasn’t room for me in the current issue so we are going to run the topic again. It is now quarterly – it used to be monthly and was way too much work! In that article, I talk about how the reflective surfaces of the bathroom window sills and bathtub walls of my childhood impacted my perception and expanded my viewpoint. This image reminds me of the mirroring wall quality.

~ Diane Clancy

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