I happened upon this effect by chance when checking out the various filters available in Paint Shop Pro. It struck me that the 'Blinds' filter, (an effect similar to vertical blinds), could possibly be used to create ertzatz Geneva stripe damascening.
At left is a look at a more conventional use of the Blinds filter. Interesting, but not overly useful, (as is often the case with the more unusual filters).
I decided to experiment and chose the shot of a Waltham Ruby movement as shown at left as a suitable candidate as it has a plain gained finish.
The tops of the movement plates are selected and the Blind filter applied with a suitable width of stripe and at low opacity. Of course, all screw heads, jewels, etc, need to be avoided or the striping will also cover them! Below is the result.
And it's not just that filter that can be used. Below I have applied other filters to create a crosshatched and a mottled finish in addition to the Geneva stripes.
Here is another example. This time I chose a Russian Molnija cal. 3602 pocket watch movement to work on. Again this movement has a plain grained finish, somewhat rougher than the Waltham movement used previously. I thought it could do with a touch of virtual decoration!
In this instance I wanted to angle the striped decoration. You will note that in the first Waltham example the stripes run vertically, simply because that is how the Blinds effect applies them. It allows vertical or horizontal striping, but not angles in-between. To achieve this I simply rotated the base image 30 degrees to the left, as shown at left. The movement area is selected and Blinds stripes are then applied as before.
The image is then rotated 30 degrees back to the right to bring it back to the original position. The result is that I now have striping at an angle across the movement. You will note that at this stage the striping covers the whole movment, screwheads, wheels, balance, and all. To rectify this the striped image was layered over the original clean movement image and the areas that should not be striped were selected and erased. This allowed the clean image to show through in those areas.
The two layers are then merged to give the final image as shown below, complete with new virtual decoration.
Copyright 2005 Paul Delury