The Photograph
The Painting
I've actually done it. And, what's more, I'm pretty proud of it! Yes, it took more than five hours over three days, but one of those days was spent fighting the Perfection Demon, who demands that anything you submit must be the absolute best you can do. For me, this is a recipe for disaster, in two ways. First, it bleeds my courage by making me fear that if I had just done a little bit more, it could have been better. Second, in artistic terms, it leads to overworking. So I took Sunday off and spent most of the afternoon and evening looking through my collection of art files, which I began back in the Gopher days (before there was a World Wide Web anywhere but in Switzerland), continued with a grant from the state art teachers' association, and — when that ran out — kept with because now I understood why my friend in college enjoyed the Art History class. This not only kept me for ruining what turned out to be a pretty good piece of work (if I do say so myself), but also gave me a couple of ideas. See that glitter in the sky: that came from William Holman Hunt. See the shining parts in the cattail: those are from Sir John Everett Millais. Thanks, guys! |
The Photograph
|
The Painting
|
Okay, let's talk a bit about what went on here. I really liked the way the photo captured the cattail, but was really not pleased with the busyness of the background. All those branches. And, yes, it was taken just before a 12-inch snowstorm, hence the color of the sky at late dusk. One of the nice things about painting is that you really can invent your own reality, including having the snow begin to fall slightly. I chose exactly one branch so that the painting would have a little depth. That's two paths, one on the right and one on the left.
To paint the body of the cattail, I took a very large brush and just made wide swipes with the colors selected from the photo, then copied that layer and used a motion blur to blend them together. It took a couple of tries to get it right, considering where I wanted one of the light sources to be, but I settled on 79° with 161 pixels of blur. Now it looked like a boring cattail. A Levels adjustment layer on the red layer brought the colors out a little more richly. Then, copy a new layer, apply a Gaussian blur at 37.2 with a Soft Light blend mode. Now there are three layer of highlights in slightly different colors with different brushes, applied using a layer mask so they wouldn't get all over everything because I knew I was going to do stuff with the background when I got the cattail done. The last one, the really bright ones, were done on a Color Dodge layer. Finally, another layer mask layer with 89.49 monochromatic noise, again with a Soft Light blend mode. At this point, I declared the cattail done.
And went to work on the branches, which were originally black. And flat. And boring. So I chose two different shades of brown from the cattail and was quite pleased that I had done the branches in two paths, so that I could do the right and left separately. This helped with the bottom light source. Each is just flat filled, with a bevel and emboss layer effect which took about 15 minutes to get right.
And now, on the sky. Down below everything, I made a very dark blue to dark blue gradient and applied it on a slight diagonal (I was trying for 79°; I don't know what I ended up with). It didn't look right, so underneath it, I made a new layer with a Render > Fiber filter using the lighter blue from the gradient. To that I added an unknown amount of monochrome noise, blurred the whole deal, and when back to the gradient layer, which was changed to a Color Burn blend mode.
Almost done. Now the stem and the withery thing on top looked flat. I picked the cattail path, made a selection of it, removed the cattail body with the lasso (with option held down), copied the two pieces, went all the way to the top layer and pasted them on top of everything. I put a couple of blemishes in the stem, blurred that part, drew the left hand shadow on the top, blurred that, and then applied the layer style, so they would have more geometry.
Then I declared it done. Yeah, Perfection Demon, the top piece should probably have some imperfections added. But this piece is done, I tell you. DONE!