The Daily Texture for 11/26/2014
Old Masters 1
Today begins the much anticipated Old Masters series I've been working on, which is an ongoing group of textures I'm creating based on the colors in historical paintings. Old Masters 1 features rich browns paired with soft blue/green and a touch of orange and gold. Take a look at the example images in which I've utilized this texture.
With the deer and the bear, I left the texture visible at full strength to provide a painterly background for the subjects. And that is how I use these textures quite frequently.
In the landscape scene "Blue Creek in Autumn", however, I've used this texture a bit differently. I have shown the original photo on the left and the finished work on the right. Whenever I decide to work with a photo, I look at it and ask myself, what is the focal point for me? What do I want to stand out in the final piece? In this case, it was the beautiful blue in the water of the creek, specifically that small amount of blue reflection in the center of the creek. That's what caught my attention and that's where I wanted the viewer to focus. The bright sunlight in the original photo, along with those wires across the top, took away from that focal point. First, I removed the wires. Then I adjusted some contrast and color in the original photo. And finally, I added the Old Masters 1 texture to the photo. I added the texture many times, in many different layer modes with varying opacity, masking out the pieces of each layer which didn't contribute to the final image. The final result doesn't show as much of the actual painted strokes as the top two examples do, but it does show a rich, old masters color scheme which is what I was after in this work.
With the deer and the bear, I left the texture visible at full strength to provide a painterly background for the subjects. And that is how I use these textures quite frequently.
In the landscape scene "Blue Creek in Autumn", however, I've used this texture a bit differently. I have shown the original photo on the left and the finished work on the right. Whenever I decide to work with a photo, I look at it and ask myself, what is the focal point for me? What do I want to stand out in the final piece? In this case, it was the beautiful blue in the water of the creek, specifically that small amount of blue reflection in the center of the creek. That's what caught my attention and that's where I wanted the viewer to focus. The bright sunlight in the original photo, along with those wires across the top, took away from that focal point. First, I removed the wires. Then I adjusted some contrast and color in the original photo. And finally, I added the Old Masters 1 texture to the photo. I added the texture many times, in many different layer modes with varying opacity, masking out the pieces of each layer which didn't contribute to the final image. The final result doesn't show as much of the actual painted strokes as the top two examples do, but it does show a rich, old masters color scheme which is what I was after in this work.
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