My rooster is feeling very French right now 🙂
I purchased a textures pack from Design Cuts last week and have been exploring all its delights and seeing what custom brushes came included, now I know how to use these a bit better.
There are maps and lovely handwriting, crests, crowns, labels, musical scores and all manner off fancy elements that will probably never get used 🙂
Taking this rooster portrait I have post processed it as follows:
1. Add a layer, fill with black and use a custom water colour brush to add the grunge texture on the walls. Using a very light brush I painted the texture off the face and feathers of the rooster so he had more prominence and brightness.
Blend mode Darken at 76%
2. Copy the background layer for added ooomph and stamp in at 100% opacity with a fancy letterhead custom brush at the bottom. Blend mode Overlay at 100%
3. Add another layer filled with black set to blend mode darken at 24%. With brush set to white and lowish opacity stamp PARIS into the background so it looks like its part of the wall texture
Comments:
In the video I saw they painted the fill layers with white but with my experimenting that didn’t always work depending on the colour of the base image. So this time I tried black to see if it would work.
Except for making the big shadow behind his head really dark (it didn’t have quite so much visual weight in the original) I am happy with this. Just a few subtle textural changes and added elements and its a more interesting image than it was.
A lighter hand with the grunge texture has worked well in this instance, focussing the grunge on the background and feathers, making it part of the image but not overwhelming it. An important lesson to learn!
Like it? Don’t Like it?
Tell me about it – all feedback welcome 🙂
Learning to See Light 
Very impressive, I still haven’t gone through many of the videos and certainly haven’t got to brushes yet. But seeing what you are doing is inspiring. Love the use of the words.
Thanks Lee, was having fun with all my new brushes and I like using words.
I havent got this far in my classes either, I have one more to do and Im finished Module 2.
But they posted two 20 min tuts on Lightstalking last week, one on grunge and the other on custom brushes, and I watched them and learnt lots!
http://www.lightstalking.com/photo-artistry-tutorials/
Thanks for that Stacey, I thought I was subscribed to Lightstalking so something has happened there. Will get onto it this weekend and look at the tuts I need to get the hang of brushes as it looks like so much fun.
It is fun and also really flexible and creative. Given you can create your own as well (the Custom brush tut I linked to before spends first half of the video telling you how to make them) its really powerful too. Im so inspired, if only I had time!
great job
Thanks, its getting to be more fun as I expiment and learn
Very nice work Stacy. Love what you did – it certainly has a French feel to this.