Finishing the smoke

A subtle animated gif where I tried to mimic the technique of the painter, in this case Seurat’s pointillism for this work, “Banlieue” (1882-83). I did it partly to test my own patience and partly to see if I could emphasize the intrusion of industry into nature by making the smoke move.

I did it by downloading a large version, and using Fireworks to copy dots of color with the dropper, then use a pen with similar sized dots to the original to add dark and light areas, lightening the left side and darkening the right. I soon discovered I needed to make it partly transparent to make it match, so the last few frames look better than the first.

I saved five times as I did this, then uploaded all the pngs into MakeAGif, first in order and then in reverse order, leaving out the first one. But it was too big, so I had to do it twice more, converting them to jpg and using advanced settings to resize, which took it from 8 MB to 2 MB, but then had to reduce it with GraphicConverter to 772 KB to get it to play here.