Beyond Layers II

Inspirational thoughts and projects hosted by Kim Klassen

Day 10 ~ Painterly Effect

For Day 10 lesson, Kim's video went through the steps of providing a 'painterly effect' to an image with the use of several textures, a solid filter set at difference mode and some desaturation and boost of specific colors.  I tried it on several landscapes with the following results:

The original photo below.  The wires were cloned out.  The blue sky and colors in the foreground were desaturated in the process with emphasis to the red rust in the bins.

A closer crop on the same processing.  

Another image using the same process.

Nelson Road ~ Day 10 Painterly Effect

Winter rice stubble plays an important part in the fall/winter migration along the Pacific Flyway here in Northern California. I spend a lot of time during the winter driving the backroads for photo ops of the migrating duck and geese populations. During my travels, this old water tower caught my eye, its days of holding water long gone. Sticking out in the landscape against the flat rice fileds, it looked as though its new purpose was for target practice.

The before image:

One more photo worked with this process.

winter rice stubble ~ Day 10 Painterly Effect

Rice is one of the common agricultural commodities of our area of Northern California. The dry winter rice stubble plays an important part in offering food and refuge to the migratory bird populations along the Pacific Flyway. I thought the color of the red barn was a great accent to the winter colors in this scene.

The before photo:

With another lesson under my belt, I'm trying to find the time to practice some of what I've learned.  I've defintely taken a different approach to how I compose some of my photos, utilizing more open space and more light.  The two photos below were shot with those principals in mind using my 50mm lens which allows for more difinitive focus and more light.  I also utilized a solid white background in both.

Music to my eyes

My Peony finally bloomed for me this year! Flowers are sometimes like old friends you haven't seen in a long while. What a treat to see the beautiful big buds forming early this spring. I used Kim Klassens texture 'awaken' .

cherries

Putting together some of the concepts from Kim Klassen's Beyond Layers II. The image was shot utilizing all white background. Lots of open space. Lots of texture(s). Lots of fun!!

Day 12 ~ Working With Brushes

In Day 12, Kim spoke about brushes that can be made and used as stamps.  Her tutorial showed the process of making your own stamp which could also be used as a waterstamp.  She also provided us with a download of stamps she had done.  For the sake of time, I utilized her stamps to come up with the following:

Still staying with the 'keeping it simple' and lots of open space.  The image above was another of the pics I took on my first lesson.   The brush worked perfectly!

This was an older image from my archives taken one rainy day.  I wanted to use the brush and went in search of something I thought would be appropriate.  It was difficult to mute down the colors (mostly mental), however after much texturing, screening and blending this is what I came up with.

This image fell together nicely.  When I originally took the photo of this Verbascum with my macro lens, I had something like this in mind.  When I have time to mess around, I hope to come up with at least a personal stamp that I can use on my photos--ah, but that's another day!