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According to the Last Supper Theory website, an amateur researcher called Slavisa Pesci has discovered new figures in the painting by superimposing a reverse image over the original. The figures are supposed to be a knight and a person holding a baby. You can find the story, and the images here.
These Da Vinci code theories get more and more delightful – who would have thought that Da Vinci had access to such sophisticated image manipulation? But wait, there’s more. I decided to have a go myself and layered a flipped image over the original. Here it is:
I must admit I haven’t examined it too closely – hard on the aging eyes, you understand – but I do think I found something significant in the area highlighted below.
Here’s a close up:
See? It’s the Devil!
Well, I’m sure if you did this long enough you’d find all sorts of conspiracies lurking in this painting – or any painting come to that. Don’t know how Pesci did it – the video is in Italian and I can’t be bothered downloading it, but he seemed to have used an image printed on film over the original. I did my images in Paint Shop Pro, but you can use any graphics program that uses layers.
First make a duplicate (shift D in PSP) of the original. Then do what you like with the duplicate – flip it, mirror, whatever. Go back to the original and make a new raster layer over it. Go to the duplicate and copy it. Now paste the duplicate over the original so that it fits exactly.
The new layer will have its own control in ther Layers box at the right of your screen (or wherever that is in other programs). Change the opacity of the superimposed layer to 50 per cent and voila! You can see through to the bottom layer, merged with whatever the top layer superimposes on that image. Have fun.
MS Paint is a very basic program supplied with Windows, but it is very useful. Think of it as an artist’s notebook – you can simply and easily sketch an idea, then save it and import it later into a more sophisticated program like PS or PSP to refine it. I have often done this with very good results.
If you don’t have a graphics program and want to experiment with MS Paint, go right ahead. You can do a surprising amount with it, get a good feel for working with graphics, and save the result in any format – just go file>save as and choose from the drop down menu in Save as Type.
First let’s take a look at the screen. It’s very simple – drawing area, which you can resize from normal to large in the drop down View menu on the top task bar. The large size really is large (bigger than your computer screen) and allows you to refine your drawing pixel by pixel. .Slider bars on the bottom and right edge of the drawing area allow you to move around it.
The menu on the left has eight icons. Reading from the top, left to right:
Select (the square) and Freeform Selection (the star). Draw around parts of the image you want to move or change without affecting the rest of the drawing.
Eraser (the eraser icon) and Fill (the paint can icon. The eraser removes parts of the picture, the Fill tool fills the drawing area with colour.
Pick Color (the eye dropper icon) and Zoom (the magnifying glass). Click the Pick Color tool on any color in your drawing you want an exact match for. Zoom into work pixel by pixel (but you will have to use the drop down view menu Zoom>normal size to reverse it.
Pencil (the pencil icon) is a simple one pixel drawing tool. Brush (the brush icon) can be resized from a menu that appears below.
Airbrush (the can icon) can also be resized, and Text (the A icon) allows you to add text to your drawing.
The remaining six icons are preset shapes. The straight slanted line icon is for drawing straight lines point to point, the squiggly line allows you to make curves. Rectangle, ellipse and rounded rectangle are self explanatory preset shapes, while Polygon (the .odd shaped L) lets you make a variety of polygon shapes a line at a time.
Let’s start by making a simple drawing. If you have never drawn with a mouse before, you will have to practice a bit. I have drawn with a roller ball mouse and an infra red mouse and found them both suitable. A good way to help you keep control is to lay a sheet of white A4 copy paper on your desk and move the mouse on that.
This is a very simple drawing of a woman’s profile and some leaves in Pencil, Black. I am going to use the Fill tool to paint the different areas of the drawing.
Go to the top menu, click colors>edit colors. A colour pallet box will appear. Click Define Custom Colors and choose a flesh color from the palette. I chose from the orange range. Click OK and click on the Fill tool. Click on the area of the drawing that you wish to fill with that colour. If the whole drawing fills, then you have left and escape route for the colour somewhere in your lines. Zoom and check the lines until you find the break and fill it in (remember to click back to your Pencil and your drawing colour).
Now fill the other areas in the same way, choosing your colours from the color palette. (Sorry about the mix of UK and US spellings here). You can also pick colours from the palette at the bottom of the screen but the drop down color box gives you more choice.
Now you can draw in the hair with the Brush tool.
And finish with the Fill tool. Just fill everywhere there’s an opening, and trim up any left over pixels with the brush.
Now click View>Zoom>large and fine tune. I used the Pick Color tool to choose the background blue, and then the brush to take out the bump on my lady’s forehead.
I also drew in her eyes and mouth, using the Ellipse and Fill tools to make the iris and pupils, and adding small one pixel highlights in white with the Pencil.
And this is my finished drawing. Later on, I’ll show you how I fine tune it in PSP.
Bear with me on this because I’ve never written a tutorial before. Tubes are such a basic part of using PSP (all versions) that I thought I would start with that. Tubes are cut out images that can be used in collage and various other graphic arts. You can use the tubes created and supplied by Paint Shop Pro, or you can make your own.
There will be ready made tubes in your program. Click on the tube icon (highlighted in white on the left of the screen capture below) and click on the drop down tube menu. Click on a tube to select it – I chose butterflies.
The cool thing about PSP tubes is that you get different image every time you click – so as you see, clicking over the blank page gives you a whole flock of different butterflies. You can get sets of tubes from the Paint Shop Pro website.
If you want to make your own tubes, that’s not too hard. You won’t get the multiple variety like the PSP tubes, but you will have your own collage images you can use anywhere.
First choose an image you want to turn into a tube. If it has a monochrome background (all the same colour) just click on the eyedropper tool (highlighted in white on the side menu).
Click anywhere on the background and you will see the eyedropper tool pick up that colour. Now click on the colour palette (usually on the right side of the screen) and you will see the background colour of the image in the Foreground and Stroke Properties box. Click on that to bring up the colour palette properties box. Highlight and copy the HTML code for that colour – in this case #ffffff. Close this box, go back to the Colour Pallet and click on the Background and Fill Properties box (this will be a different colour). When the Colour Palette Properties box comes up it will show you the colour that is being used in Background and Fill. Paste the code for your images background colour into the HTML field. Now the colour of the foreground and background will be the same.
This is important to know because tubes will only work if the Foreground and Stroke Properties box and the Background and Fill Properties box are the same as the background colour of your image. This can be any colour at all, it doesn’t matter, as long as they are the same. If your image doesn’t transfer to the new canvas as a clearcut image with no background at all, then likely you have odd colours in Foreground and Background properties.
To add your new tube to a collage, right click on it. (Make sure the foreground and background colours in the colour palette are the still the same). Right click on your canvas and you will get a menu – choose `paste’. Paste will offer you a number of options, choose `paste as transparent selection’. Your chosen image should appear as a cut-out on your canvas with no extraneous background. If the original background is still there, right click and cut the image, then check that the foreground and background colour squares in your colour palette are the same.
If your image has a multi-coloured background, this method won’t work at all. You need to erase the background completely. Set both Foreground and Background Properties boxes in the colour palette to the same colour – white or black is easiest because you don’t have to cut and paste the HTML code.
Then click on the eraser tool, resize it to suit and erase the background from your image. Depending on which foreground and background you chose, the erasure will leave a white or black background. To fine tune your erasure, zoom in on the image and lower the size of the erase tool.
Now, since the foreground and background colour are already set to match, you can just right click on your image, click on copy and then transfer it to the new canvas as a transparent image.
Now you can save your tube. You can save it normally as a .jpg image and you will still be able to use it anytime as a tube as long as your foreground and background colours match the background of the tube image. I hope this has been easy to follow – if not, give me a holler. I use Paint Shop Pro 9 so the location of tollbars and the colour palette may be different on older versions.
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