Sports of Nature

Monday, 27th June 2005

dandelion, inverted

dandelions

I'm scanning images for my garden book today and at one stage in Photoshop I hit the wrong button and invert the colours of this dandelion: suddenly there's a colour negative on screen; the yellow has turned to blue, its opposite on the colour wheel, while the black and white pen looks more like a white on black scraper-board, or something drawn with a light pen.

dandelionsIt's a striking effect but, on reflection, you can't beat the traditional yellow dandelion.

 

Megadigitalis

foxglove, given the pop art treatment
Foxglove given the Serif PopArtPlus treatment.


Foxglove
Digitalis purpurea

foxgloveOn the grounds that ' in the future every flower will be world famous for fifteen minutes' I gave this mega-star of a foxglove the Warhol treatment in the Serif PopArtPlus which had come free on the cover CD of Digital Creative Arts.

Barbara spotted this single XXL bloom on one of the white flower spikes in the border by the bird feeder. It's has a more symmetrical shape than the usual policeman's helmet-shaped foxglove flower and it's growing out of sequence; you can see, above, that a foxglove normally has buds at the top of the stem, flowers lower down and the developing seed capsules below.

This mega-flower has jumped the queue and burst into flower before its time. I photographed it ten days ago, it lasted for several days then, following its fifteen minutes of fame, it withered and now appears to be setting seed. There are four or five times the normal number of sepals (four) around the base of the flower, so it looks like a little globe artichoke. Next Page

Links

Digital Creative Arts

PopArtPlus from Serif

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk