My latest piece of digital art is a street scene in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. But, the scene is not one you’ll actually be able to see if you go there. It’s a composite of three photos I took some years ago and put them together to create the scene. This is from a method by Cindy Charles, one of the artists in Kaizen, a digital art group I belong to. Here’s the final result (you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them a few times, but you’ll have to use your browsers back button to return to the post):
Here are the three original photos that make up the composite:
The first two originals are actually extractions from larger scenes and the obelisk is the original photo, from which I later extracted the monument.
The process I used, more or less, was to move the three extractions to a new canvas and move them around to my liking. Then I converted everything to black and white, and began painting in the colors of the buildings by hand. I put each color on its own separate layer so that I could control the opacity and other properties of each individual color. I put the layers and the relevant extraction in a group so I could move them around easily. I didn’t paint the obelisk in the far background and I didn’t paint the clothing for the people walking in the street.
I used a tropical color palette that I played around with in Adobe and used it to color in the buildings. After I finished, I discovered that I had painted in some colors that were very close to the original colors. But, that was OK. The painting took quite a while, but I enjoyed doing it, since it was the first time I had done this much hand painting. I used a soft round brush and the soft light blend mode for each color, and I painted with my Wacom tablet, which I hadn’t been using that much. Fun, really.
I added a few textures, a color lookup, a vignette and a few other things to complete the project. I discovered, though, that there are a seemingly infinite number of variations that can be made, so I may add a few of them to this page, soon, hopefully.
I had fun doing this piece, and thanks to Cindy Charles for the method. I know this one could probably be better, but I’m going to keep trying on other cityscapes and I’ll keep trying to improve this one, too. Enjoy.