Pre-Painting Puzzle Process #1

 

Large Puzzle Selfie Design
Black & white photoshop images in a montage of vertical and horizontal line versions.

 I have about 12-15 designs for puzzles, so far all pandemic self portraits, in process. So, while I wait to paint more, I thought it might be interesting to show some of the process of how I get to an image ready to transfer print, then paint. So, this might include original photos (all iPhone images), photoshop processing and especially the method I've been developing for awhile for doing unusual halftones. 

Start with the original photo, from January 2021.

Then the Photoshop work begins. This can be simple or complicated, depending on what I'm looking for. I have developed my own way of of taking photos and applying halftone screens to them. I find it much more creative an interesting than just doing the old much in some numbers when turning it into a bitmap.

A basic setup. This does include all layers (layers are extremely important using this method). Basically the order in which these are created is bottom up. 

Original Grayscale version - more usually done as a Hue and Saturation adjustment layer.

Add Vertical grey line layer. The line pattern created in Illustrator, and blurred in Photoshop. This is as it first comes in, with the layer set to 'Normal'. 

This is the vertical grey one layer,  set to 'Multiply'.