After working with the paper now for a while and testing its exposure to an analogue way of working, I wanted to start combing this with a digital image to further develop my original idea. To proceed I’d need a digital image to work with.
To do this I decided that I wanted to play with how both analogue and digital technologies render the surface of things differently so I employed a few different ways of image-making to make my digital image. First I borrowed a hand-scanner to try scanning wooden surfaces, part of the original Bauhaus exercise. This was quite fun because I’d never used one before. The hand scanner is quite challenging to work with, it has to remain in contact with the object you are scanning and if something is too complex it simply cuts-out. I scanned various items to see what would happen and a few of them you can see below.
I combined many of these handspans on to one single digital canvas that would projected onto the digital silver gelatin paper. I also “drew” woodgrain onto the finished canvas in black and white to have some defined areas of both black and white. The hand-scans are all rendered with the objects reproduced 1:1 in scale, this to keep everything (both analogue and digital) at the same life-sized scale. I applied a gradient to the whole image to help work out combined digital and analogue exposure values. The finished digital image for my first analogue and digital test is below:
