FLOWER SIDE CHAT
This image is a composite and mixer brush painting entered into a print competition for the Professional Photographers of America (PPA). I received a merit for this image towards my degree in Photography and Art.
The last couple of days I have been working on yet another technique, but this one requires much more painting skills. I did use mixer brushes, but for the most part, I painted the image from a reference file and generally just painted! As you can see from the reference images in the framed version, the flower directions are pretty much the same, but didn’t use most of the leaves and stems from the image.
I took a blank layer and just free handed the shape I want, warped a piece of the original image into my shape so I had some paint colors to begin working with and then used various brushes to build the leave interiors. I built the right set of leaves first, then cut out one of them, flipped the leave, used the puppet warp tool to radically change it’s structure and repainted it for the left flower.
I finished the image as usual with my mixer layer to blend edges, my average color blur for color harmony, and then the blur and soft light finish. I ran my competition mat action that I built and picked two pink colors from the background. I added a canvas weave texture to the frame, which my action already builds a layer for and allows you to either turn it on or off.
This is a much more detailed painting process than the other mixer brush techniques I’ve been using, but much more artistic in the end, as you really do have to paint the image from your imagination in many places.
Here is the finished work framed and the two reference images:
Below is the framed image for the competition
