Looking for Dinner

This is an image I created mainly in Corel Painter using John Lowther’s Landscape brushes – still learning how to use them but they are beautiful brushes! I have done a couple different iterations of this image, but I think I like this one the best. My birds are always my favorite subjects so here is another one. I did have to use Photoshop to add the egret (in the set called rEgrets I’ve Had A Few by Midnight Touch that are really nice egret brushes). Once the bird was added, used the Mixer brush to add detail and color to the face and body. Frostbo Grass Set 2 brushes (my favorite Photoshop grass and reed brushes!) were used on individual layers and a Gaussian Blur filter set to a Radius of 3 was used to soften the strokes to fit in with Painter reeds and grasses. Topaz (see sidebar for website link) Lens Effects was opened and the Single Tone Filter set to Morning preset was applied to warm it up. Topaz ReStyle was opened and the Zambezi Zest preset was used to bring out some more autumn looks – in ReStyle the Color Style was set to Soft Light Blend Mode and then back in Photoshop the layer was set to 65% opacity. A Solid Color Adjustment Layer was set to medium gray, Color blend mode, and 55% layer opacity -the areas I wanted to appear a little more vivid was painted back in the layer mask. That was it! It took a while to get this the way I wanted it. Just takes some experimentation. Lots of fun!…..Digital Lady Syd