The White Wall Challenge

Those of you following me for a while will have heard me comment how inspired I am by Brooke Shaden, to the extent that I bought two of her training courses on Creative Live recently.

I also joined her 30 Days of Creativity Challenge in March and the FB group for that is still fairly active.  Brooke has recently started the White Wall Wednesday Challenge – where you use a white wall as your backdrop and create from there.

My spare room has a large white wall, however it is quite narrow so a full body shot is difficult.  The point of the challenge is to work with what you have and embrace the limitations.

Therefore I could do a torso image and expand the frame around to get sufficient canvas and scale.  This is one shot of the main subject and the cracks are an image shot with my cellphone yesterday of broken glass, bought in and fiddled with to get different seeming crack patterns.

Post Processing Steps:

1.  Edited main image in LR and bought into PS, expanded canvas and painted in from background colours
2.   Bought in crack images, layered and masked, duplicated and warped in sections to make look like different breakage patterns
3. Change colour of fabric and hair
4. Edit colour tonings of image (many little tweaks)
5. Add  a couple of texture layers to finish

Here is the original base image for comparison:

Note there are about 20 layers in here – I made a few mistakes – still struggle with selecting things cleanly and did a lot of masking around edges where it was not tidy.

Stoked that I managed a much better colour change on the fabric, and toned hair to be similar.

Really struggle on the overall toning of the image, what seems like it should be the easiest bit is the hardest, and I am not sure why – any advice welcome.

Overall, much happier with this image, its not too dark.  I like the colour tones even if it isn’t quite what I envisaged for this image.   The right hand looks like its floating above the surface, and I can’t quite figure out how to fix it, got a bit lost within the layers in that section.

Pounding fists on a wall so hard it breaks – I love to hear how my images make you feel, what springs to mind when you see them?

 

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