BaRoW Apocrypha

Rhapsody in August is one of my favorite Kurosawa films. One of its most stunning scenes is a shot of two withered tree trunks in the middle of a small clearing surrounded by wild flowers. I wanted to do something along those lines, involving a rotted tree stump and some kind of moss growing up one of its sides. I wasn't quite sure how this was going to work, so I practiced on these cheap little non-ATCs I got a few weeks back. They're slightly smaller, and made by the same company that made the craft tags for the Punch Card series. In short, they're awful to work with. At least, they're not a good fit for the BaRoW series. At first, I tried a sort of gradient approach, only filling in one side of the stump, leaving the moss to "hang" in white space. It looked terrible. Later, I got the idea to carefully fill in the rest (so I would avoid the inks bleeding) and it seemed to look a little better. I still have no idea what the little red floaty bits are supposed to be, you can work that out for yourself. As I was saying, the cards are awful to work with for a number of reasons, key among them being their texture. It's a kind of quasi-linen finish, like some canvas papers or acrylic boards, but far more severe. You can work around it, and it does offer some unique characteristics, but then you try to scan it and get awful, awful moire patterns. Apparently, they're just the right size that the scanner goes completely batty on the colors. I tried seeing if shrinking the image would help, only to find it made worse. Fortunately, some minor adjustments of brightness and contrast reduced the effect significantly, though it's far from a perfect solution. If I were doing this as a silhouette piece (where I do my colors in post), I could simply remove all the color, but this wasn't going to work for a full-on traditional card. I will definitely revisit this one, this time with a proper-sized-and-textured card, but the fill-in helped it enough that I wasn't totally ashamed of it, so here it is.