Filtering and blending
 

Went to the Ashmolean in Oxford today and took a couple of shots of the Egyptian reliefs. As I didn't have a tripod I put the camera on 400 asa mode, and underexposed by 2 stops to get 1/30th exposure. Back home I corrected for the underexposure and whilst the original is a bit grainy and soft, when reduced to 800x600 doesn't look to bad.

However, I decided to play a bit with one of my favourite filters, sketch master which converts a photograph into line art. I created two lineart versions the first of which I think is alright in itself, and the second one has potential for further manipulation.

These images started with the second lineart image and combined it with original image using different blends. The first one is a lighting blend. The second is a blend of the original image over the lineart twice, the first layer is an "if darker" blend of the colour inverse of the original, the second layer is a "hard light" blend.

There was something about the last two images that had a sort of sixties feel to them, sort of Woodstockian, the stylized flower looks a bit like a microphone, so back to the filters.

Very "Album Art" feel to this. A bit more editing to accentuate the microphone similarity and you have a winner.