iPad Artist - Lilies

Lilies

This is one of my many images blending a woman with a flower. I want the woman to take on part of the shape of the flower, while retaining clear recognizability as a person, yet with the key character of the flowers to also be clearly present. For these types of blends, it is best if both of the images to be blended have their subjects isolated against simple, preferably flat, backgrounds, and that both are rather simple compositions or simplified renderings.

I started with this photo from the Rijksmuseum website, which provides high-resolution images free to use and modify for any purpose, in their Rijksstudio.

Now I will bring in an image that I created from this photo from this Rijksstudio image.

I cropped as much of the frame away as I could. Then I used Form/Warp to drag the remaining parts of the frame off the canvas. I continued to use Form/Warp to transform the shape of the woman into one what seemed to me livelier and more interesting. Then I smoothed using Style/Coherence and Style/Flow, and I used Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 as well as Tone/Enhance for depth and color, and Adjust/High for highlights and sharpness.

In Effect/Blend, I opened the flower image and touched the photo icon at the bottom right to bring in the woman image on top of the flower. I tried several different blending modes and slider settings, particularly the gray and lightness sliders under Set, but also the opacity and feature sliders. I used my fingers to resize and reposition the flower image so that the larger, open lily covers the woman's features. I saved the best results I could get with a variety of different blending modes, about 5 or 6 different versions, a couple of which I will use in later blends, as we will see.

Here in Effect/Blend, I used a brush mask to paint away the top of her head, zooming in close to make sure I didn't lose any of the flowers.

Here I again used Effect/Blend to bring in the lady, and used an inverted brush mask, to bring back some more of her eyes and mouth. Then I again used Effect/Blend, this time to blend back some of the color of the original flower image, again using an inverted brush mask.

Here I used the results of one of the other blend attempts, using Effects/Blend and an inverted brush mask, to blend in more of the little inner bits of the lily above her nose between her eyes. I zoomed in close to get just the parts I wanted while painting the mask.

I again brought in the results of a different blend attempt, and used a brush mask in Effect/Blend to blend in some of the background color from that image, to make a more uniform background for the image, particularly at the top and bottom of the image.

Then I again used Effect/Blend to bring back the original painting of the lily, so I could bring some of the leaves of the white flower in the lower half of the image, to bring more of the lily to the foreground, mixing with her white blouse.

I used Adjust/Levels and Tone/Enhance to improve color and contrast.

I applied a texture and a paper (Texture/Paper).

I enhanced color and tone using Tone/Enhance at low opacity and Tone/Sepia at reduced opacity.

I wasn't satisfied with the textures and paper I applied. Here is one I like better, where instead of applying textures and paper, I downloaded a textured image from the Rijksmuseum and used Effect/Blend to blend it in at very low opacity.

Here is the Rijksmuseum texture image that I used.

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