take risks!
Take risks in your work,
and work in a way that
allows you to risk. It’s the
best path to growth. Let
your ADD work for you.
Act on those fleeting
hair-brained notions
while working on a
piece. Pursuing those
experimental paths
can be a time sink, but
consider it investing in
yourself. If your process
makes risk too difficult,
change your process.
Again, be proactive!
12
Marrying the figure and background with edges
Once the figure and background are close to final, I carefully build rim lighting that plausibly puts the foreground
elements in the setting. Then I look for edges that look too sharp in context, to soften them with blur, colour and value.
13
Further refining till baked
The curse and blessing of a digital process is that it’s
never finished. Every time I come back with fresh eyes,
there’s more to tweak. I get another great paintover from
Lars, which convinces me to further reduce contrast in the
background, creating more atmosphere and further
popping the figure. It’s cycling back in my step-by-step.
14
Final filtered abstraction
I use a range of finishes from photographic to quite painterly, and decide to
keep this one fairly detailed. I f latten the image and use filters to unify the noise
and grain of the various photo sources. On this one I use the Paint Daubs filter, then
copy that layer and apply the Watercolor filter. I then set the transparency of that
layer over the prior filtered image at about 50 per cent for the finishing touch.
August 2017 83
In depth Photobashing