"Break Away"
This image is available to purchase in prints here: My Artist Website
This image started as a photograph--a motion shot that I
took of a neighbor running back to her house in a new dress that someone recently
made for her. I caught her in the moment
and something about it reminded me of Cinderella or Alice in Wonderland, so I
spent a few hours in photoshop and here’s what I came up with.
Now to break it down step by step:
For those who are familiar with photoshop and are just curious
about my approach, needless to say, it was very experimental. I started off by making a quick selection of
the girl running and then fine tuning it.
I inversed the image and then began working on covering the car and
street with the clone tool. I realize
this is considered an old fashioned technique now, but I enjoy having some
control over the placement of things as I copied and pasted parts of the grass
and trees. I used the softest brush option with about 90 percent opacity/flow
and made my placements with a path in mind.
Then I used the soft brush and a low opacity to paint a path (taking the
color from a light area in the trees). I
used a textured brush and added some spots alongside the path to create flowers. Finally, I added some lighting effects (go to
Filter; Render; Lighting effects) and used a default spotlight, angling it on
my path. I added a lens flare (also found
under Render) that started behind the trees, and voila. Of course, I did lots of experiments before
choosing the final route. I played with
the colors through different adjustment layers and I changed the textures of
the girl’s surroundings with different filters.
I know this is all in a nutshell, so if you have any specific questions,
please feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to answer.
Here is the image before I made the path.
I toyed around with colors before I decided on the final image. I was debating on the path looking more like fog. What do you think?
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