My painting today is a composite and painting. The cactus image was captured last year at the botanical gardens. It was shoot with a very narrow depth of field so only the orange flower was in focus. The warbler is also from the gardens at the bird blind but on a different day. I captured about 5 or 6 different birds feeding that day and cut them out of their backgrounds. I just had them in a folder for that occasion when I needed a little bird for a composite.
I had to turn the cactus image significantly and adjust the bird to try and get a composition that look correct. I used content aware fill to complete the areas of the canvas that didn’t have any content after rotating thing around. Then I painted it with the mixer brush.
The background was painted in a couple of layers. I painted the green buds first and blended them into the painterly background. Then I painted the sharper orange flower on a separate layer and blended it all together. When I finished, the lower left corner was really bland. So I took a copy of the original image and put it in soft light blend mode and mask out all but the lower left corner so the original texture of the cactus came through a bit more.
The bird was much more complicated because of layers of feathers. You always have to paint the underlying layers first and then stack the upper layers on top. I did an under painting first. Then I painting the belly and the legs, then the wing, then the back and neck then the head. I painted the beak and eye on separate layers.
After the entire bird was painted, I merged him into one layer and then I had to build the feet to simulate him holding on to the flower. The lower foot was basically painting in and then blurred a bit to match the depth of field of the flower. On the upper foot, I masked out the tips of the toes so I could repaint them curved into the flower. I then took a piece of the flower and cloned it over the foot and masked in so the foot looks like it is hooked into the edge of the flower.
I added some details to the eye with a couple of curve layers and my color dodge layer to brighten the eye. As the lighting for both images was already coming from the same direction, I did not make adjustment to the lighting on this composite.
Here are the original two images:
I did have one bonus find today during painting. I stumbled upon a brush that I had built some time ago and had it in my “Bird” folder. It turns out that it is fantastic for doing the small little feathers for birds like these. I also built another brush for the tips of the long feathers. I painted the feather first, then used the long feather edge brush to pull out the edges over the layer below it. It worked fantastic. If you want to try these brushes out, you can download them here. Should be two brushes in the .abr file.
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