There’s a new collection up; painted bitmap masks.
These picture were made by painting directly onto bitmap masks to selectively reveal a flat coloured layer overlaying a background, most often white over black. If you don’t know what that means and you’re interested, I’ll explain a little further down.
Mask painting is an unusual and awkward way to work and because of this it sometimes yields unexpected results, which is one of my main motivations for exploring peripheral techniques like this. So on that level at least, some of these pictures were successful. My personal favourites are this one and this one.
All of the pictures in this collection are monochrome or nearly so. I have some more colourful examples but I haven’t decided what to do with them yet; I thought they looked out of place with the monochrome ones.
Here’s a brief description of how mask painting works. I’m going to assume almost no knowledge of Photoshop.
Pictures made in Photoshop are built from layers. A layer is like a big transparent sheet that you can draw, paint, and paste pictures on. Layers are placed on top of each other to make a stack, which can contain as many layers as you want.
Photoshop offers lots of different ways to play around with layers. One way is to use something called a layer mask. Just like a mask in the real world, a layer mask selectively reveals some parts and hides others. Layer masks work like this: any parts which are painted black make the contents of their layer invisible, any parts painted white make the contents of their layer visible, and grey gives partial visibility.
Ok, so the way these pictures were made was by making a background layer, usually solid black, which was then overlaid by a layer of a contrasting colour, usually solid white. Then the solid white layer was masked with an all-black mask, completely hiding it, so that only the background layer was visible. Then the mask was painted on directly with white, grey, or black to reveal or hide the white layer a little at a time, gradually building up a picture.
If you’re familiar with Photoshop you’re probably wondering why you’d bother doing this, since it’s pretty much the same as painting white directly onto a layer. But if you try it for yourself you may find that it handles differently enough from direct layer painting to make it challenging and interesting, and requires enough adjustment of technique to make the results refreshingly unpredictable sometimes.
