University of Kansas Campus Memory

University of Kansas Campus Memory
Originally uploaded by randubnick.

This piece of digital art is based an image cropped from the background of a photograph I took of the KU campus at Mauro's graduation in 1988. Lawrence and the University of Kansas were on CNN this morning and on my mind today because of the news about the tornado that did some damage to the campus. Many of my pictures from Lawrence, Kansas are of the wonderful people I met there, but when I looked for an photo of the campus, I found far fewer than I expected. So I decided to use this image because, for all its problems, it captured the characteristic shapes of the campus skyline. The small image that I cropped from the photo was extremely blurry, and you could hardly make out the buildings against the pale pink sky. So I opened the image in Painter IX and used the colors in the original photo to darken and sharpen the shapes of the rooflines, and changed the color of the sky to blue to add more contrast. Then I added more pastel to the foreground and even covered up the top of a football scoreboard. The effect is closer to a drawing than a photograph. I like the soft edges that evoke the workings of memory, even though my memories of the time I spent there are as clear and bright as crystal.