Colourful Shades of Grey

I have been working on a new photo impression series of wildlife, and have been working on ways to bring the process closer to the way and artist might create the image. In particular I wanted to achieve a characteristic Australian colour scheme, but at the same time keep the colours to a harmonious scheme an artist might choose. I began using an old favourite utility from big huge labs, called colour palette generator. This take a photo, analyses the colours and produces a harmonious set of colours based on that photograph. I did this for all the images I am contemplation turning to mosaics and discovered that all the images shared 5 shades of grey, a mid grey, a light grey, a blue grey, a warm grey & and olive grey. I then used another favourite software tools called Just Color Picker, Which allows you to point to any group of pixels in an image on screen and displays its code in a variety of formats: HTML, RGB, HEX, HSB/HSV and HSL. It was the RGB codes that I would use later. At this point I made notes of the contrasting and complimentary colours which are displayed in the lower panel of just color picker. Just to make sure the colours worked I then made a series of watercolour & pen compositional sketches, to give myself more confidence that these automated colour tools where not leading me astray, and that the 5 shades of gray where in fact a good foundation for the colour scheme of my photo mosaicing process.My next task was to generate my palette of tiles that both followed this colour scheme and also complimented the texture within my photos. I was again using Apophysis, a free fractal flame generator project, which has the facility to control both the flames shapes, and thus texture and also the tonal gradient, and colour scheme. I made up 75 fractal flamed coloured tiles using 5 sets using backgrounds based the 5 shades of grey with 5 rotations of the patterns using 3 tonal gradients that used complimentary colour schemes.The final step was to use mosaic creator, which is a very powerful mosaicing tools, that can create a mosaic based on a source photos using a palette of other images (my file library shown below). For this series I choose to use a random grout (a visible gap between tiles) based on a colour enhanced version of the source photo.