The Illustrations

The illustrations to my poems are often the inspiration for them, and become an integral part of them. The following case is an example of how it works.

The other day I was trying to get an old cell phone to work, and discovered that it still had 25 pictures on it. Among them were two nude selfies, taken in 2011. One of them interested me, both because it was from another time period and because it was so very ordinary. The old phone would not allow me to send or transfer the photo, so I photographed the screen of the phone. Here is the resultant image:

I then converted the photo to a gray-scale, black-and-white image, always the next step. In the process I adjusted brightness and contrast:

It is now a usable image, but still an unremarkable one. Another step is necessary to produce the high-contrast, virtual line-art illustrations that I use in the blog (both for aesthetic reasons and because they are easier to print):

This last step is a very delicate process, and can produce a wide variety of images from a single original. Suddenly we have a much more intense image, capable of inspiring a poem. In this case, it has the further advantage that it can now pass through social-media censorship.

Text and images © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.