Saturday, November 17, 2007

Contrast Study #3: OpArt

I like playing with "stroking" an image in Photoshop. (For those that don't know, that's when you make a selection and then create a solid border to that selection, either inside, outside, or centered, at the width in pixels that you decide.) I recently made an action that would select a layer, stroke it at 2 pixels in black, then select the layer with that stroke and re-stroke in white. Then you repeat and you get this:

I think this is real neat. I wish it was real obvious that this was one of my bots to the untrained eye, but I doubt that people who recognize my bots would even see it. Except for the "Robots Are Friendly" around it. I added the text to help point out the robot-ness of the image and to give it a bit of grounding. It was real hard to focus on without that. I might turn this into a sticker one day, but who knows. . . I am lazy after all. I think that if it does become a sticker it would be successful even though it's not obvious what it is simply because it would give people a bit of an optic shock. And with the text there I think some people would think that maybe it means something. It doesn't, but if someone sees it and thinks "This must mean something!" then I'd be extremely pleased.

2 comments:

Nico Starlight said...

Since i discovered OpArt in the sixties: I love it! I'm thinking of making/buying OpArt clothes and Dance in BlackLights and in StrobeLights, like i did in Psychedelic shows long time ago.
Nico.Starlight@hccnet.nl

Andrew said...

Thanks for the comment!

I've always liked op-art because of what it can do to your eyes, not to mention your brain! It's a little unsettling on both fronts.