Floral Montage Works
Flowers are scanned digitally and then assembled in a montage on the computer.

Gallery 3

THIS GROUP IS FLORAL IMAGES USING DIGITALLY SCANNED FLOWERS. My goal here is to present the vibrant color and organic structure of flowers. However sometimes the flowers overlap and fade into each other in mysterious layers. Perhaps behind it all is my attempt to blur the lines between representation and abstraction.

They are all created digitally through scans of flowers and other actual objects on a flatbed scanner, collaged together on a computer, and initially printed as Giclee's at high quality and high resolution on superb CANVAS material, stretched on 1 1/2" deep stretcher bars, and ready to hang without a frame.

What are Giclee Prints?

A Giclee print is an ART QUALITY PRINT. It is an exceptional high quality ink print made on a high end professional wide format printer by a highly skilled print maker. Materials and inks used are of superior quality and intended to achieve both stunning appearance and excellent display life. Giclee prints are available here on both high quality canvas and watercolor paper.

I prefer to make Giclee prints on canvas because I believe that in this way they gain more of a physical presence. I also am able to achieve more vivid coloration which is important to me. Also because the canvas prints are stretched on wood stretcher bars the image surface projects 1-1/2 inches out from the wall plane.

Creative Process.

Most of the objects I include in my works are initially scanned on a large bed (11x17) flatbed scanner in order to get finer detail and to get a special quality of lighting. I usually scan at higher resolutions to get a 50 to100 Mb image, anticipating making large format Giclee prints. I rarely use digital camera images.

In Photoshop I create the background first, sometimes using images derived from a scan of materials, or of paint on glass, or an abstract background drawn in Photoshop, or occasionally a digital camera image. I then open multiple images from which I select out desired portions which I drag and drop onto the background creating new layers which can be moved, rotated, re-sized, or manipulated in the collage process. Frequently I have somewhere between 10 to 30 layers and the collage process may take several hours or sometimes days.

The construction of the shaped pieces start with the printing out geometric shaped backgrounds derived from scans of various textures or from digital still images collaged in Photoshop. This is stretched on a 1 1/2" deep wood frame just like a painting. On this is glued a second layer of canvas cut outs of flowers some of which extend beyond the picture/frame edge. Wood blocks 1 1/2" deep are attached to support these canvas edge extensions which are then glued down to the wood. After that the visible sides of the wood blocks are painted with acrylic to match the colors and textures of the printed flowers which wrap around the 1 1/2" sides of the piece.