Mobile At Monday No. 45

I'm not sure where May went but I didn't get much posted on my blog. I may have to make up for lost time. I know I took a record number of photos last month and have yet to process most of them (including grandkid pics in the poppy gardens).

I've been wanting to create illustrative type works and I think I've finally achieved one way to do this.

The original.

I held a white foam core board as a background out in my garden while capturing this shot.

Well, I say this is the original but if you look toward the lower left corner you can see a few light dots where I attempted some cloning (healing) in Snapseed. It wouldn't cooperate so I quit knowing I would need to take out the other stem and was thinking about moving the lower right bud up into the photo more. At this point I got distracted so later when I started my editing I forgot and just jumped right in to Stackables.

Here's a TIP... When planning on applying textures, don't increase the exposure such that your background is white. A light tan or grey works so much better with adding textures and changing blend modes.

Here are a few edits I came up with as I played.

I loved them all but decided to play with the middle one.

I loaded my original in iColorama to make a black and white sketch. Choose Style> Edges> Preset 9/19 set on overlay to give its touch of color and reduced the edge size to 50%.

Next I loaded the 'yellow' version into Leonardo and the drawing version from iColorama. I set the blend mode to color burn.

I saved this and loaded it into Retouch. I cloned out the stem on the left and the whole bud on the right and saved it. 

I then loaded it into Leonardo so I could 'move' the bud higher. I did this by duplicating my layer, masking out all but the bud, then moving it to line up higher on the stem.

Since there appears to be some 'missing' lines, I open it in Procreate to add more. While I'm there I decide to add some paint and a little texture. 

Another TIP...

I pulled a 'photoshop' move which is lightening or darkening an area by painting white or black with the layer blend mode set to overlay or soft light. Your brush opacity needs to be very low. I really liked the look and will probably use that for future edits. It's especially nice to have optional brushes to use and be able to better control the area effected.

Once more back to Stackables where I add one texture that brightens and makes it pop more.

Hope you're having a great Mobile Art Monday!