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Knot within a Knot Coloured Sketch

 

I came across a site a few weeks back called colourlovers.com.

It’s a social networking site for Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen types.  The idea is you use its COPASO or basic colour tool, create a colour palette, publish it and share it with other artsy members of the community. 

It’s the kind of idea that if someone explained it to you as their “great idea” you might think their cheese was sliding off their cracker.  And yet it’s a great tool and quite fun. 

The last time I was on there someone published a palette:

Luton, England

Made me laugh and without stopping to think I wrote a comment

That’s hilarious, Lutons a hole!!

Turns out it was posted by a Polish bloke, he commented back on my wall:

Knowle is a small village on the road between Braunton and Ilfracombe

OK, bit of a strange comment maybe??  So I wrote back saying I meant no offence, he explained

Maybe Luton is a hole, but this English town is still important for me and many Poles - the airport is there!

Still a bit confused but all seems to be OK as now we’re ‘lovers’ (of each other palettes).  The Internet can be a strange place sometimes. 

Anyway, here is the Palette I designed yesterday:

Colour Lovers Palette

Colour Lovers Pallette ‘Night Surfing’

I chose the colours for this palette based on a photo by Al Mackinnon in and old copy of the Surfers Path (May/June 08).  The picture’s of Devon Surfer Chris Clarke taking off on a Scottish wave at sundown.

I’ve then taken these colours and used them to paint my sketchbook drawing of a knot within a knot; I designed the knot above a while back (more details in this blog entry: http://blog.newtangled.com/2008/11/sketchbook-knot-underwater-photo/)

The painting was done in Paint Shop Pro 6, and I used roughly the following steps:

1. Cut photo of sketch and rotate
2. Increase brightness and contrast
3. Make Grayscale
4. Further increase contrast
5. Make ‘16 Million’ colours again
6. Use ‘Magic Wand’ selector to select sections (adjusting RGB tolerance between 15-25 to help it select the sections I wanted)
7. Use a normal round brush and opacities between 75% and 100% (as I was aiming for a really strong bold look close to the palette I chose)
8. Paint is fast sweeping strokes
9. Apply a blur filter to smooth the hard edges resulting from using a high opacity paint.

Bobs your uncle… Its given the image a really bold look and bleed / masked effects similar to a silk screen print over gutta.  The painting has a really psychedelic look, and I suppose this relates to the art Nouveau look which has relations to the forms found in Celtic knots.  I think the sweeping air-brush type strokes have kept close with the graffiti street art style too.