I’m having a bit of fun with Adobe Illustrator, using a combination of brush textures, drop shadows and clipping masks to create ‘torn paper’ effects. I was thinking of posting the results, but then I realized that the poster I’m doing this for is full of close up and gory photos of tendon repair surgeries. Probably not the best thing to spring on people without warning.
A couple years ago I had done some prints for a doc who was working on an esophageal surgery project. It was one of the first things we’d printed on a new photo-quality dye sublimation printer and you could see every ridge and fold of what turned out to be a very close-up photo of a dissected piece of heavily acid-scarred stomach lining. It wasn’t anything that we really wanted to spend much time looking at.
The funny thing was, the immediate reaction of every doc who stopped by the office was to go over, pick up the print and hold it a few inches from the tip of their nose while saying things like, “Wow! Look at that! That’s absolutely beautiful!”
I guess that’s the whole “eye of the beholder” thing going on there. Or at least evidence that you can get used to pretty much anything.