Yesterday I edited & updated all the images on RainyCraze.com with a fresh coat of paint. Digital paint. It’s the same basic color cast on all the photos using a super simple gradient map. If you didn’t notice, I care for vivid, poppin’, way-out-there colors, which I also stated on the about page. Though they’re the same photos I used when the site went live in December, I had only done some basic editing with little color correction.
The image above is my inspiration for this transformation. It has served as the header on my Twitter & personal Facebook page for several years. My good friend, Charlotte, took the original photograph while studying graduate art with emphasis on experimental portraiture. As part of her research on portraying people through associated objects, She arranged this still life of my favorite everyday items.
I didn’t make the cut to a final oil painting of my stuff, but I did become a model for a finished anti-portrait in a series. But that’s another story.
Of course, the original photograph of was in boring real-life colors. As an exercise in screen printing prepress, I used Illustrator to live trace it a bunch of ways, added those layers together, & colored them in one of my favorite color palettes. There are another few versions of this image that are more screen print friendly, with one or two less colors & different halftone effects.
I’m not sure why I only just thought of unifying all the images this way. Certainly the photographs are all of volcanoes & lava, so the content isn’t disjointed; even my own photo was taken on a mountaintop in Pisgah National Forest with some pretty cool rock outcroppings. A fresh coat of paint can be a foundation or be a nice touch; his is somewhere in between. And now everything, unmistakably, belongs together. As made by Rainy Craze.