Page 3  -  Series EG-012

And now for something completely different . . .   We were still looking for that Art Deco machine-engraved effect, and thought we'd found it - have a look at EG-012a and EG-012i on the third and fourth rows below.  Then we started tweaking and the whole thing went haywire; most of the effects seem to suggest a DNA double-helix heavily into bondage!   Quite pleasing and certainly striking.  With this series we again employed a small-scale black-and-white repeat pattern, but abandoned using a grey-scale monochrome environment in favour of a coloured landscape photograph - perhaps that's the source of the richness of some of the results' colours.

Once again, we have not used any beveling here.  Also, the only differences between the individual Presets are in the lighting, glue mode or iricolor settings, separately or in combination.

This page's main background is generated from a seamless tile created in part with Super BladePro, using our Preset EG-012i on this page.  This was applied once to a white image and the result (see below - bottom row, far right) then bent almost out of recognition - cropped, embossed, sliced, and its tonal range and colour balance severely adjusted.  You will find the tile itself in the Seamless Tiles section of this Gallery (Series EG-012, Preview Page 16), together with a tutorial on making tiles using this series of Presets as a starting point.

AND THERE'S MORE . . .

We did a couple of small trials with some of these Presets, just to see what happened.  One trial was to apply them to different coloured  images (remember that the samples above were from a white image) and the other was to apply them more than once.  If you would like to see the results, just click . . .

The Presets in this series do not lend themselves easily to producing seamless tiles for use as backgrounds and borders.  The repeat pattern is none too perfect and is of considerable size.  If you want to spend some time, effort, and a little thought, perhaps the best approach is to start with a large image - say 500×500 pixels - and apply your preferred Preset.  Now the fun starts; take the result and . . .

Select a part  of the result (not too  big) which you think might make a good tile.  You will then have to do a fair bit of adjustment - edge-matching, smoothing, etc. - but despite such awkwardness, the time and effort can sometimes be worth it; the background for this  page is an example.

. . . or . . .

Reduce the result's image size to 20% or less.  Then identify the vertical  repeat pattern and crop to it.  Do this full width, as the horizontal  repeat is the width of the image.

. . . and there are probably a dozen other techniques you could use.  Why not have a go yourself ?

We try to practice what we preach, so we made a few tiles using the two methods outlined above.  They're included in the Seamless Tiles section of this Gallery, together with some notes on how we produced them.  If you just want to see what they look like, click . . .

Possibly the best direct  use for this series is for text decoration.  We used EG-012a - without adjusting or "cleaning up" the result - to create the "Super BladePro" graphic at the top of this page.

ENVIRONMENT & TEXTURE GRAPHICS . . .