A Work in Progress: Morning Glow

This guide was made for entry:
Morning Glow
In Contest:
swing

Original image

step 1 of 12

Reference photo for heron by SeeMidTN at flckr.com

sources used for this step:

: source

step 2 of 12

Water for background is started with many duplicates of the wood posts cut out of source photo.

step 3 of 12

Liquify-warp tool has been used to blend the duplicated shapes into water (Canvas has been rotated to horizontal)

step 4 of 12

Here are the 2 steps used to create piece of driftwood using liquify-warp again.

step 5 of 12

Filter/texture/grain/speckle (at 40 and 50%) are added to get interesting textures into driftwood. Burn tool will add needed shadows for more dimensional look.

step 6 of 12

Here a blue/gray solid color layer is added behind the water, then water is reduced in opacity to 45% to allow the cool gray to show through. A gray/wh gradient layer is also added with lighter color toward the top of the background where the light will be brighter.

step 7 of 12

Here are the steps to creating the cattails from a piece of the source wood.

step 8 of 12

Cattails have been duplicated, some scaled a little higher and they are placed at various heights to make a more interesting foreground. Some of the leaves w/out the catkin on top are used to fill in, some brought to front layer to overlap the driftwood.

step 9 of 12

Here are the first steps to creating the heron, starting with liquify-warp to generally shape the bird's head, neck and body.

step 10 of 12

Steps 4 and 5 of creating the heron, with color being brushed on. The reference photo bird was lassoed and used as reference material only. It could have been used without reproducing it, but I wanted to do it from the source and do the artwork myself.

step 11 of 12

Here the heron is being completed. After all the colors are brushed in, dodge and burn tools help to add details on head and on feather at back of body and on long legs.

step 12 of 12

Here the heron is completed and placed on layer behind the driftwood and more light has been added at top of the water layer using render/lighting effects/omni light/(at about 75% intensity)A med blue filter is placed over the heron at 45% just to give it a little more color.

Final result

Votes

user	voted
violscraper
minnie
CorneliaMladenova
Score: 10

Comments

violscraper says:

Simply beautiful!

(5 years and 3129 days ago)

Pxleyes

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