Paint abstracts

There is a simple technique to create unique and beautiful abstract images, and you can do it in your kitchen. You only need two things: A Tupperware container and paint. For the paint, Home Depot and Lowes sell samples of any color you want in small containers for only $4 each, and at Etsy online they are only $2. I purchased six different colors for the pictures in this article.

Purchase only water based paint so it’s easy to wash up when you’re finished.

All I did to create these beautiful abstracts was

to pour two or more colors into the Tupperware container. From there, you can rock the container back and forth, tilt it, and use a utensil to mix the paint colors together until you like the design. Then, photograph it with available light or with flash. All of these images were taken with flash because I wanted 1) daylight balanced color, and 2) a small lens aperture for complete depth of field. The flash provided enough light for me to use f/22.

The entire abstraction has to be sharp from edge to edge. Even though it is an abstraction, it still needs to be sharply focused. Therefore, every image should be taken with a small aperture unless the back of the camera -- i.e. the plane of the digital sensor -- is parallel with the plane of the paint. If the two surfaces are exactly parallel, the lens aperture doesn’t matter becaused you will have achieved complete depth of field across the entire surface.

For a variation on a theme, you can pour the various colors of paint onto an interesting subject (that won’t be ruined by the paint). On page 11, I illustrate this with two different elements. I bought the porcelain mask in New Orleans, and it is impervious to paint. The watercolor-based paint can be easily washed off in a sink. I poured various colors onto the mask until I liked what I saw.

The second image on page 11 is a fork. I was stirring paint colors in the Tupperware container with a fork when it slipped out of my hand and fell into the paint. I thought it looked interesting, so I photographed it with a flash off to one side. The way the shadows fall tell you where I placed the flash. Since the wet paint is reflective, you have to be aware of unwanted

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tions. Reflections from a nearby window, as you can see in the mask, may not be a problem. But the wet surface of the paint will reflect the brilliant light from a flash, and that blown out hot spot will be distracting.

Because we now have the ability to manipule color so easily in Photoshop (such as using the command Image > adjustments > hue/saturation), the original paint samples you purchase are not so important because they can be altered in seconds. In post-processing, you can change individual colors or the entire spectrum. You can also use the positive-negative command, Image > adjustments > invert, which converts every color into its complement. So, green becomes magenta, yellow is changed to blue, and red goes to cyan. If you don’t like the results, use the undo command or choose Image > adjustments > invert again. This command toggles back and forth between positive and negative colors. §