Tulip--The Emerging

You know, Magic: The Gathering, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Generic Horror Movie: The Sequel. You've got to have a cheesy title. Yeah. I'll keep telling myself that it has nothing to do with my inability to come up with a deeply profound and meaningful title, and am reduced to random verbal gymnastics to avoid all the cliches.
Aside from that, I was so pleased with the sort of technique I came up with in Iris--The Rainbow (see, I warned you about the cheesy titles, didn't I?) that I wanted to see what more I could do. Both of these are done with a desktop wallpaper in mind, although I think the iris one can stand very nicely on its own, too. Anyway, to produce this one I copied one row of pixels and stretched it to the height of the image, then did a little cut-and-pasting to make sure the bands of red and yellow were the full width of the flower. I did a little displacement mapping to distort the vertical lines where the shape of the flower should be, put the image of the flower very faintly in overlay mode to get a teeny bit of highlight and shadow, and added the cutout head of the flower in normal mode and erased away very carefully so that it would look like the flower was emerging very slightly from the page.
After that it was just a matter of copying and reversing the background lines on the righthand side and distorting them, then adding the border. I have to admit, I didn't have much faith in this at first, mostly because the colors are pretty loud and I had wanted something with a smaller color palette like the iris one (mostly shades of purple). I tried in vain to adjust the colors and lightness, and failed miserably. But it's grown on me, especially since I was able to take the idea of the technique several steps further, rather than just repeating the same steps.

Incidentally, you can tell I like this photo a lot--it's the same photo as Flamed Tulip, also used in Tulip Abstract.

I've also submitted a wallpaper of this image, at 1024x768, Emerging Tulip -Wallpaper-

See also Iris--The Rainbow and Iris--The Rainbow -Wallpaper-.