This one is a little different; sort of an abstract flower painting. I made this piece of art, including the background, with JUST ONE IMAGE.
Here is the photo from the botanical gardens that I started with – right out of camera, no adjustments.
To start the background build, I added blank layers and selected several of the colors from the image. Using one of my background painters I built colored layers that would eventually be smudged into the background with a mixer brush.
I started to mix the layers I had painted, but the image was getting too pink. I wanted more of the tan color in the center. So I just relocated my tan layer (that was originally lower in the stack) above the already partially mixed background and continued to mix.
This is the background after the mixer brush and before I included the background image
I then took a copy of the original image and desaturated the colors. I added a mask and using a cloud – steam brush, I painted with black on the mask with the brush in a very low opacity – building up the effect until I was happy with how much of the image was exposed over the background colors. I lowered the opacity to about 81%.
But the image was pretty dull and the background flowers really didn’t pop much. So.. next step.. I took a COPY of the colored background and place it on TOP of the image and put it in the LINER LIGHT mode at about 45%. This popped the colors but kept the outlines of the water lily leaves and background colors muted and desaturated in the background. I had to mask the corner just a bit as it was too saturated with color.
Here is the FINAL background results.
Here is the layer stack in Photoshop of the background build.
