Hot Line
Now:
The bad is easily the texture on the circuit tracing shapes and the dark beveling that doesn’t look right.
The good is the fairly intense glow and light vs. dark values, plus the sort of shiny scratches among the dark areas. Almost as if old copper was being scratched to reveal fresh-bright redness underneath.
Then:
The impetus for this abstract design came from two things. One was an idea to make an image that took advantage of glow effects to make an element look warm and bright. The other was an image that appeared for about two frames in the movie The Mothman Prophecies. Since the image was there and gone so quickly, I’m not even sure if I what I retained in my mind was what I actually saw, but either way I had an image in my head and wanted to see if I could come anywhere close to doing it justice myself.
This was a very quick, spur-of-the-moment project in Corel Photo-Paint. First off I created the background by layering several different types of fractal fills until I had a red-brown texture that looked weathered and contained some noise. I eventually added diagonal streaks as well, using a rotated “interference” fractal fill, which seemed to hold things together a bit more. Merge modes for the various texture layers were usually set on multiply and given some transparency so as not to completely obscure the lower layers. Then I set the grid and drew the sort of circuit design, which became the basis of several masks. One mask was used to fill the circuit area with a basic yellow, and others were expanded, feathered, and painted on to be used for an additive yellow fill that would achieve the glow effect. With the glow in place, the dynamic range was not enough, so an inverted version of the mask was used to help darken the rest of the image. Finally, another layer with the “interference” fractal fill set on divide with a high level of transparency was added to produce the horizontal scratches and highlights that help further rough up edges and blend things together.
This image was created in July of 2002.
