Home Sweet Home, Details

Here are the side by side comparisons which show how I pieced together this contest entry.
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I really wanted to create something that was completely different and
practically unrecognizeable from the source pictures, while still
allowing people to discover where the pieces of source pictures
were utilized. After a few days of mulling it over, I realized
that I had enough elements such as bricks, window panes, and
interesting architectural details to create a storybook cottage
of sorts!

By isolating the various parts of the brick house, such as the
brick itself, or the small section of roof, I then did slight
adjustments to them all to help correct the slight angle that
they were originally shot with. After that, I duplicated them and
aligned them up, then merged the layers
so I had one big blank wall of brick to work with, or a long
stretch of straight 'roof'.

By using the warp tool, I was able to create my roof line. Then by
using the liquify tool, I was able to get the curved, fairytale type
look for the canoopyover the door. I did the same to the windows, but first I
had to duplicate the bottom half of the windows visible in the
photograph, straighten them as well, then resize them to fit them
on the front of my cottage.

Using layers, as well as liquify and the distortion tool helped me
achieve my little window to look open, and allow for the little girl
to peek out at her kitty.

I then went to the photograph of the car, and nabbed the detail of the
gate behind it, as well as the shuttered window. The gate took a bit
of time to extract from the background, but fortunately the 'magic wand'
tool helped with some of that. Then I duplicated the shutter, adjusted
the color to match the house, then overlayed a portion of brick that
I had cut out with an arch to make it look more like a fanciful door.

I went back and found the wooden trellis on the house, cut it out and used
it as decoration on either side of the door. I then placed the trellis
above the windows, and used the morph tool to fan it out. I used the layer
mode on 'overlay' to sort of burn the look I achieved into the brick,
to make it appear like a sort of fun design over the windows.

Then I cloned the bushes in from the original house shot, all around the
gate, as well as cloned in the cement around it. By using the clone
brush as a paint brush, I was able to make the bushes appear like they
had vines growing up the side of the house to the very roof.

From the bedroom scene, I took the blue flower that was beside the bed
and pulled the edges of it (after I extracted it from the background) with
a small smudge tool, which gave the petals a more wild, random look. Then
by changing the hue/saturation, I was able to dot a variety of colored flowers
around my scene.

Also from the bedroom scene, are the two little dragonflies which are
a little difficult to see in the picture unless you look close. I
extracted them, and placed them in my picture - one above the girl in
the window, and one off to the right of the doorway canopy.

The girl was in such a natural pose to be gazing out the window, that
it was easy to fit her in. I used the erase tool on a low setting to work
the panes of the window so you could see her a bit through it. I then
just painted a hazy reflection of her in the other window directly behind
her shoulder.

I wanted the kitty to have a little more fairytale look to him, so I used
the warp tool on him as well, to give him big eyes, pointy ears, and a curlycue
tail.

I also cut out the window panes of the bottom floor left hand window, and
painted a warm yellow behind it. Then over the top I applied a white, soft
opacity color dodge to make it seem like a glowing light was on inside.

Once I had cut out a chimney from the brick wall that dominated the whole picture,
I was then left with an empty sky. So I took the sky above the palace
picture, scaled it to the size I needed, gave it a gaussian blur to soften
any pixelation from the scaling, and colorized it a little more.

The finishing touches were added with a gaussian blur added at the edges,
as well as a bit of darkening. Then texturizing with Corel, and a plume
of soft, handpainted smoke. I then went over the whole picture in Adobe
with a large, fuzzy brush and the 'color burn' mode set on low. Shadows,
richer colors, etc were all brushed in. Then when I had merged the whole piece
and pasted that as a new layer, I went through and did my trademark lightly painted look. Some hue saturation changes,
a bit more dodge and burn, and voila. My Home Sweet Home.