I posted the above image to Facebook. It shows all the “captures” I have made to date. They’re neatly sorted and bound. A stack of artworks. What is the collective noun for a collection of artworks?

A friend remarked that:

… an interesting way to mark the passage of time …

Its true!

The artworks, looked at from the side, all stacked together, resemble strata… each one, a progression through my practice, a reflection of it at that time. You can see the colors change, but grouped with each set that I made. Its a tease in that the artwork itself is hidden… only the ink on the side is visible… an alternative reality.

I decided to explore this a bit further, and took some other images of the artworks. I took these on the flatbed scanner, selected the best one, then did some manipulation in Photoshop to remove the background and replace it with a blue-gray wash… normally I use a more gray gray, but I went this time with one with a more of blue hue in it… the sideways view of the artworks is quite colorful, and I wanted the background to have a bit more color than a neutral gray. Masking was a fairly difficult and Photoshop struggled a bit with the quite frankly enormous image — 80MP to push around — but I got there in the end. The aesthetic result from using a flatbed scanner is an image with an acutely short depth of field, which works well for something like this… again, that element of tease as only the briefest hint of what’s on the face of some of the “captures” is shown.

I’m really happy with the end result. Its now my Facebook cover image… and its too good not to be used elsewhere. I could possibly increase the tease factor by cropping in tighter… will have a think and a play later.

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