The Banner
The banner for my homepage is actually an image of my hometown's topology! I zoomed out a little, destroyed the color curves, sent it to black and white, and then colorized it. I am very lucky and proud to live in the mountains and am happy that this turned out so well. I think that we can create so much cool art from patterns we find from nature. I did all this in Affinity Photo 2! Here are the progress steps, hover for more details:
I took a screenshot of my hometown from a website that displays topographic maps. I had to play around with scale and locking the elevation key to get some intresting contrast. This screenshot here is from Iowa (not my hometown).
Adding blur will give the final result its bubbly texture. More or less blur can adjust how detailed the areas of color are at the end. I used a guassian blur with an 8px radius. The black bars are so I don't dox myself. Fun fact, guassian blurs are non-destructive and can be reversed. The only data lost is on the edges of the image!
I added the black and white filter on a whim, but it turned out to be very important for the next step. This filter is applied at 89% opacity with some small tweaking done to the indiviual colors effected.
The real changes happen when you screw up the color curves. Adding a curve modifier and changing the linear curve to a very sharp square spike will create the sharp lines between colors. You can adjust the location of the square peak to get different patterns and variety of colors.
If we just colorize it without inverting the colors we get a dark mess. The color inversion, or high contrast mode, will let the colorization control more of the end result.
The last step is to just recolor your result. I went for a medium cyan color because that was the theme I wanted to use for my website. Loads of different colors here will look good.