This image began with a negative that I found today when I was looking for a picture of my dad. It was a small negative and I could make out who it was (but not where) and I couldn’t tell the quality of the image. But I was curious, so I scanned it in to the computer, and then used Painter software to create a “positive” image from the negative. Yes, it was a photo of my dad holding me and my Uncle Bob holding my cousin. (I was raised in a big house that held two families: my parents, my aunt and uncle, my cousin, and my grandma.) I was excited because I didn’t recall seeing this photo before. But I could see why it hadn’t appeared in any albums, because the focus was too soft and the image was a little blurry. But I thought the image had potential, so I kept going. I still couldn’t figure out the location (and something seemed strange about the faces) so I decided to try flipping the image horizontally. And sure enough, that was the problem: I had scanned the image wrong way round, and once I got it right, the faces looked better and I recognized the house where I grew up! So then I had some fun adding color and posterizing and finally turned this into a woodcut. I thought this would be a good post for Father’s Day.

Here is what the negative looked like:

And here is what it looked like “flipped”:

And here is the photo “wrong way round”:

And here it is, flipped horizontally. This is the image that I worked from to make the digital woodcut, shown above: