The Exquisite Crane

Hi, dear Readers:
4 weeks already gone in a fly!! My ArtRage course is ending today!!!
The natural elegance and grace of the crane birds are exquisitely and fascinates me.

In this painting I put everything we learned together.
This was a 4-week course at the Digital Art Academy with Karen Bonaker.

I used a traced image,


and painted the bird in Art Rage using tracing colors. When the bird was finished, I saved as png and transported it into Photoshop, where I selected the bird by outline and filled with red to achieve a bird shape. Saved this as a png file( I name it mask-1) and imported to layer in ArtRage. This layer you can always convert into mask at one mouse click in the selection menu options.


For the background I used one of my Photoshop masks which I saved as a png file and converted into a stencil.
Now I could paint the background without worrying to modify the original bird painting because the bird layer was protected with the selection. I used the stencil in the layer below and painted the background using the rule of opposite colors, like Karin told us to do. Layers blending was also used at this point to soften the background.

The Shadow:
I distorted and added a perspective to the mask-1 from the bird in Photoshop


and saved again as png file and imported back to layer in ArtRage. With a lower opacity and a color burn blend mode effect on this shadow layer, my work was finished.

Thank you to all sweet course colleagues for looking and commenting at my work and a big thank you to Karen for opening the door to such an interesting and fabulous painting world!

Keep save and have an nice weekend!

Silke

PS. - I recommend Karen Bonaker's course here at the digitalartacademy.com