Visual Alchemy: The Fine Art of Digital Montage

Catherine McIntyre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138457959
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135046149
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Teaching Art

Catherine McIntyre, like many fine artists, created traditional art for decades before encountering the versatility of digital imaging technology. Free of her Rotring pens and scalpel, she now uses Photoshop to create her montages. Visual Alchemy explores McIntyre's sources of inspiration as well as her methods, offering an aesthetic guide to composition, color, texture and all of the other means of communication that artists have at their disposal. While these concepts and techniques make use of Photoshop, they will apply to any digital imaging program and indeed to any medium, whether traditional or digital. Featuring McIntyre's own art as well as that of artists around the globe, Visual Alchemy is an invitation to discover the artistic possibilities of picture making through digital montage.

{Index}

absence 76, 77, 79

abstraction 74–5

Adamson, Robert 59–60

Adobe logo 124

Adobe Photoshop 4, 8, 44

canvas size 121

clone tool 184–5

color tools 121, 152, 154, 157, 178

file size 102–3, 109

gamut facility 160

history palette 108–9

inversions 187–8, 195

layer modes 4–5, 99, 101–2, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 117, 154–5, 157, 165, 180, 184, 188

proportion 121

selection tools 104, 105

agents 211

ambrotypes 2, 9, 90, 95, 146

anatomy 9, 10–12

digital dissections 86

models 85–6

textbooks 10, 86

Ancient Egypt 25–6

animals 9, 13, 64, 65

architecture 58–9, 62, 93

modern 61

ruins 59–61

archives 32, 89–90, 210

back-up your back-ups 210

Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 66

Atget, Eugène 25

Atkins, Anna 5

background 87, 91

creating 20, 103

removing 53, 105, 180

white or black 25, 52, 97

Bacon, Francis 79

Baillière, Jean-Baptiste 86

beauty

appreciation of 17

communication 18

essential to art 17

facial 41–2

finding 17

harmony/balance 18

idea 18

mortal 20

surrealist 20

truthful/logical 17

Becher, Bernd and Hilla 7

Bertillon, Alphonse 38, 41

Blakemore, John 70

Blossfeldt, Karl 25, 67

Boni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• INTRODUCTION
• THEMES
• BEAUTY AND IDEA
• INFLUENCES
• INSPIRATION
• SUBJECTS
• COLLECTING SOURCE MATERIAL
• METHOD
• COMPOSITION
• COLOR
• TEXTURE
• TONE
• INVERSIONS
• DISTORTIONS
• DEVELOPING YOUR IMAGE
• THE FINISHED IMAGE
• FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
• Acknowledgements
• Model release form
• Further looking and reading
• Contributing artists
• Index