The Making of a Yoga Pose

Blog post by guest author: Freaky Friday

Self-professed yoga nut Freaky Friday has agreed to write a guest post about her trials and tribulations when creating yet another yoga mosaic masterpiece.

You’re probably thinking “Why all the yoga pose art, Freaky?”, well, the answer is simple. I’m a yoga nut, specifically, I’m an Ashtanga yoga nut. I’m so nutty I run two yoga sites; Rate Yoga, a resource web site that lists Ashtanga yoga books, DVDs, CDs etc and lets visitors rate and comment them, and Asthanga Dairy, my personal blog on my yoga practice.

So, now that it’s all cleared up why Freaky’s so freaky about yoga, let’s get onto the making of “Yoga Pose - Kapotanasana”.

After the success of the original yoga pose, I got thinking about my next project. I have a few ideas up my sleeve, but I had to get all this pent up yoga-ness out of my system so I thought I’d just make one more yoga pose art.

I wanted this to have a different feel to the original. The original has a wonderful dynamic feel and elegance about it. The new yoga art is meant to have a softer quality about it, still elegant, but more… gentle, almost comforting. Mind you, I don’t think kapotanasana is actually a comfortable position to be in!

Firstly, before any tiles can be dragged, I needed a reference photo.

I found this beautiful photo of kapotanasana. The picture had that soft quality about it and the colours were beautiful, just perfect. It was just meant to be a reference photo so I could see what the pose looked like, but I ended up using the colours because they were just too perfect.

Creating a custom seeding image

So now that we have the topic, we needed the right colours. As you will read further on, this turned out to be a massive challenge, but I’ll get to that later. The colours were going to be based on the above reference image, but I couldn’t just simply upload that photo and be done with it. No, that would’ve given me too much beige and not enough teal green and pink.

So the task of getting the right amount of the right colours started. The seeding image is actually made up of two images. I found that the original photo didn’t have very good flesh tones, they were too dark and when uploaded onto TheBroth, they looked more brown than flesh coloured.

I used the flesh colour from the seeding image I used for the first yoga pose artwork to give a more balanced and lighter coloured flesh tone.

I used Photoshop to crop, cut, copy, paste and rearrange the two images until I got what I thought was the right amount of each major colour I was going to need.

Let the tile dragging begin…

After a few hundred tile moves, I took the first snapshot, just to save where I was going, in case something unforseen happened.

Judging by the left over tiles, I already knew I had a big problem. I was going to run out of tiles. I was starting to panic about what to do about the lack of tiles, in particular, flesh coloured tiles. I thought, “Let’s just get as much done as possible before I tackle the not-enough-flesh-coloured-tiles issue”, and out came the second work-in-progress snapshot.

Oh damn, this wasn’t going to be a happy ending. It was clear I wasn’t going to have enough flesh coloured tiles. I needed to start playing with the seeding image colours.

My first attempt at manipulating the original seeding image was very conservative. I removed some dark brown from the image, I wasn’t going to need so much of it since the hair wasn’t going to be a large area.

I uploaded the seeding image and added more to Miss Kapotanasana.

She’s got some pants now and her full outline. I wasn’t very happy that her ass looked big, but I didn’t want to muck around with the outline, not at this point. I completed her head, and even gave her some dark brown hair.

I had also started to pick out the flesh coloured tiles, as you can see by the tower on the right.

Colour hunting, colour sorting…

I started getting into that tile sorting mood, just to see what colours I had left, how many tiles I had left and what colours I was going to need. This is the snapshot of Miss Kapotanasana with sorted tiles on the right, grouped into blocks of 40 tiles (4 x 10).

This is when the “fun” of colour hunting really begins. It’s probably taken me about 3 hours to get to this stage, 3 hours over 2 nights. Is that long? Well, no, considering what’s coming up next.

Anyway, back onto colour hunting. Since I had completed the pants and top, I wasn’t going to need any more green or pink tiles, so taking the original seeding image, I started filling in some of the green and pink areas with some flesh colours.

Why the original image? Why not just make a new seeding image with the right colours? Because if I did that, I would lose the majority of the coloured tiles that were already in the right position. This means I would effectively have to start all over again from scratch. Since I had already invested about 3 hours, I wasn’t prepared to do that.

Once I was happy that I had better colour distribution on the seeding image, I uploaded it to the room I was working in. The good news was that there were more flesh coloured tiles, the bad news was that most of them ended up dotted over the pants and her top. I anticipated this though, but not to the extent that it happened. Her top was about 7% filled with flesh tiles but her pants were about 15% filled with flesh tiles.

One word, “urgh!” Ok, so that’s not a word.

I never took a snapshot of the mosaic when her pants and top were partially filled with flesh tiles, that would’ve been interesting to see. Anyway, I picked out all the flesh tiles and replaced them with the appropriate coloured tiles, then filled up her legs, then I took yet another work-in-progress snapshot. This is number 5.

Out of tiles, so soon

As you can see, my tile problems just aren’t going away. I never thought I would use those famous words, “I ran out of tiles”. Yes, despite my careful planning, I now realised I’ve made Miss Kapotanasana too big.

I’m in trouble! Not only do I have to contend with the wrong colours and having to go through colour hunting, I have to contend with the not-enough-tiles issue.

Again, one word, “urgh!” Yeah, yeah, I know that’s not a real word.

I was disheartened. I didn’t think Miss Kapotanasana was going to be finished. But I plodded on. I started to fill in her arms…

Then after more colour hunting…

Tentatively more colour hunting and filling in of the arms, all the while feeling distressed that I wasn’t going to have enough tiles.

Eight tiles left and a whole head and neck to fill.

Obviously, this isn’t going to happen. I had to do something drastic or abandon this artwork.

Does my Broth look big in this?

Remember how I said I thought her ass was too big? I bit the bullet and decided to reshape her whole butt and thighs. This involved literally taking apart every single tile, except for the outline tiles, then moving the outline tiles around her rear end to reshape the thighs and butt, then filling her pants in again.

I ended up with quite a few more spare green tiles. So off I go again, colour hunting. I even resorted to counting how many green tiles I could replace with flesh coloured tiles and playing the seeding-image-alteration-upload-count-and-repeat game until every single spare green tile I had was turned into flesh coloured tiles.

Then finally, after even more precision tile moving, what would you know, we have a finished yoga pose.

Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

NO!

As pretty as the thumbnail looks, the full sized mosaic was less than pleasing. She was so jaggy all over.

At least the colour hunting was over, that was a pretty tough task, and after another couple of hours of tile dragging and heaps of precision work, we end up with something less jaggy and much closer to the finished product.

Smoothing the jaggies - Miss Kapotanasana goes on a diet

Miss Kapotanasana is much thinner now. The only way to smooth out her lines was to find more tiles, so I made her thinner by one tile all over and used those spare tiles to smooth out her outlines.

You’d think I’m finished now, but no, unfortunately, we’re not done yet. Her chin, nose and mouth area weren’t pleasing me. It looked somewhat like the male bits of a greek statue. Her front leg calf wasn’t looking much like a calf either.

So guess what? Yup, another hour or so of precision tile dragging, humm-ing and har-ing and getting rather frustrated in the process. In the end, I got to a point where a) I was pretty happy with the results, and b) I just couldn’t be arsed anymore.

The final result

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, I give you the final snapshot of yoga pose number 2: Kapotanasana…

This artwork took me one week from start to the final snapshot. A total time of about 12 hours dragging tiles. 11 snapshots were taken and 11 seeding images were uploaded.

There were some late nights, there was some hair pulling and quite a bit of frustration and some disappointment, but in the end there you have it, a finished artwork.

Thanks for reading my freakin’ long mosaic tile dragging adventure story. See you soon in the members room! :-)

- Sue Zann Toh aka Freaky Friday

Related links:

• Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga - Wikipedia.org’s take on Ashtanga yoga
• Ashtanga.com - Ashtanga yoga information site
• Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute - Sri K. Pattabhi Jois’s Site
• Ashtanga Diary - My yoga blog
• Rate Yoga - My Ashtanga yoga resource rating site
• Sue Zann Toh - My personal blog