i-m-a-g-i-n-efx-august

In depth Photobashing
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!
Marrying the figure and background with edges
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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.
Further refining till baked
13
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.
Final filtered abstraction
14
I use a range of finishes from photographic to quite painterly, and decide to
keep this one fairly detailed. I flatten 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
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