Driving Through Connemara (Posterized Photo)

Driving Through Connemara (Posterized Photo), a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

This image started with a picture that I took during a trip to Ireland in 2004. We were near Galway and got lost driving through the rocky Connemara hillsides. I was taking pictures from the passenger seat of a moving car (as usual). These are not the lush, emerald green fields that most people associate with Ireland. The landscape is beautiful, but stark, and even seemed desolate to me at the time -- not just because we were lost, but because of awareness of the hardship faced by people trying to make their living on this rocky land. Today I cropped this image out of the original (to remove windshield, road sign, etc. The result was small so I used Painter to resize the image, and then used a combination of posterizing and woodcut effect (and a little digital pastel) to create an image that I could use. I then did a little more adjustment in iPhoto and here it is. I remember the scenery of this beautiful drive, and the lessons learned about Irish history along the way.