My latest composite and painting. I started with two of my images from my Africa trip. The bull elephant was at the fence of our resort the first day at Thorneybush. We had a faceoff until he started throwing dirt at me and I decided it was time to move on back to camp. (yes there was an electric fence between us!)
I made the background with colors selected from the color wheel that were associate with the primary color in the elephant using various background painters and mixer brushes I built. Then superimposed a portion of the sunset image in the soft light blend mode at low opacity for the horizon.
The foreground grass is a custom brush I built using a hair brush, turned it into a "savannah grass brush" with dual color and a bit of angle and size jitter. The dust is a smoke brush. There are several layers of dust and grass, mixed to give it depth.
The elephant was painted pretty loose, I didn't want him to be photorealistic. I used a desatureated copy of the elephant in multiply mode at a very low opacity over the painting just to bring back a bit of his rough hide texture.
The elephant was painted pretty loose, I didn't want him to be photorealistic. I used a desatureated copy of the elephant in multiply mode at a very low opacity over the painting just to bring back a bit of his rough hide texture.
Read more stories about my painting and compositing work on my blog:
https://terributlerphotography.com/posts/
https://terributlerphotography.com/posts/