le grand mouche – the big fly!

A strong dry wind has been blowing through our area for so long, even the palm trees have been wind burnt on their north sides, and our natural beaches have lost much of their lovely dune tops and are now smeared all over the place!

Taking a good camera into such sandblasted conditions, is at best foolhardy, but I’ve always been a bit foolish and just put it under my coat when not in use!

Here I am, cowering from the wind, bending over the camera, trying not to get sun flair on the lens, all very hit and miss.

The great thing about the sun on the sand is its huge natural light reflection, so back at home in Raw mode, I was able to knock back the blown-out head sun halo, and pull up the light recovery 100%, thus giving a kind of flash fill-in effect.

If you mouse-over the image, you’ll see the base image after i’ve already done this, or you’d just see a dark silhouette effect.

I then duplicated the image and used the Photoshop filters to add first a slight watercolor effect, a slight poster edges effect and finish with a paint daub effect, to give the image its graphic quality. I’ve also been playing with my new Intuos 5 touch graphic tablet, and with it I painted the eyes brighter, giving the whole picture a kind-of strange illustrative German expressionistic feel.

The finished beach – blow fly image fully earns my French nick-name; le Grand Mouche or the Big Fly!

Texture packs used were Summer Painterly and Tex Box 1

Dawn Grunge – Overlay @ 68 %

Touchstone – Overlay @ 100% brushed from head area

Necropolis – soft light @ 100% desaturated and brushed from head area

Raw linen – Soft light @ 100%brushed from head area

Finishing with a slight overall color desaturation to knock back the red wind burned skin tones and bright blue sky.

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my own private little vineyard

Sunday morning was misty with freezing fog.
Thus not to miss a perfect texturing opportunity, I drove out of town to get some bleak countryside pics. This cute little scene was glimpsed from the car, and so I did a fast 'u' turn to get back to it!
The other pictures had the Cabana or Mazet with the vines leading up to it, this was the wild card, as is often the case, spotted as I left the scene. The recipe is correct, I always save the layers in their own job files. Thus I could, if I wished, just open up an old picture, and just click and drag the old textures across onto new pictures, it can save loads of time! Both Jill and I sometimes do this! :-)
Finishing touches were cloning out litter on the left and softening the top of the tree before adding the final Mulberry Silk texture, this pulled it all together. Some colour softening was also done with the colour sliders, to warm the tones.
I wonder if anyone else see's the similar cracked face in this image as seen in - 'My Own Private Idaho' Movie?:-)

Leadenhall - Linear Burn @ 20% - over sky only, rest brushed away. Flipped vertically and skirt pulled above image and cropped off.
Necropolis - Soft Light @ 100% slightly desaturated.
Pompiii Stucco - Soft Light @ 100%
Apple Blush - Soft Light @ 67%
Leadenhall - Color Burn @ 20% over sky only, rest brushed away.Flipped vertically and skirt pulled above image and cropped off.
Antique Liaisons - Luminosity @ 11%, Flipped vertically.
Mulberry Silk - soft light @ 100%

See it bigger on Flickr

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$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

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Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

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