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Elementals Mosaic

Inspired by pappy65's new group, Making Mosaics.

 

A canteloupe flower rests in the center. Clockwise from upper left: sunset clouds, footprint in sand, rust, clouds with sunbeams, dirt, ocean wave, moon, and pond. They are set against a wasp nest background.

 

I wanted to try out a mosaic using something other than squares. I created the octagon in PowerPoint, then brought it into Microsoft Photo Editor 3.0.2.3 and made all but the originally black outline transparent. I set Microsoft Paint 5.0 to transparent, then brought in each photo I wanted, positioned the octagon where I wanted it, and copied that section. (One can choose a photograph to fill a shape in PowerPoint, but PowerPoint then assigns the entire image to the fill.)

 

After I had filled and copied all the octagons I trimmed them manually in Paint, assembled them, and set them against the wasp nest. I took another copy of the octagon, changed its color, and positioned it over the originally black forms, slightly offset to create some shading. I did the final crop in Photo Editor. Both Paint and Photo Editor had come bundled with my computer.

 

All the photos except one were taken with a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6. I photographed the sunbeamed clouds with a $30 Argus DC1500, the wonderful little camera that had introduced me to digital photography.

 

 

Update, 19 Jan. 2012: This collage appears at the 4-minute mark in the Science Online 2012 Art Show, curated by Glendon Mellow and Karyn Traphagen.

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Uploaded on January 9, 2006