Since beginning the new Pop Surrealist style, I've encountered situations in which I need very subtle and ambient backgrounds. Through discovery and exploration, I've discovered that the backgrounds I like best in this style, are derived from Victorian imagery. Throughout the development of this stylistic series, I've used a variety of Public Domain paintings from the Victorian age as Exemplars in my Studio explorations. |
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At this point, I've been basically using these Victorian Backgrounds as Placeholders. The Backgrounds themselves have been very crude and technically, very low resolution. |
I want to start building high resolution backgrounds to use in my finished paintings. |
I'm going to start with a background idea that was initiated in my last Painting Project - #1435-Improvisation. |
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I have been using (I can never remember the name of this technique - Render...something - RenderTests?) a background technique in my latest work:
- Bring the composition to a settling place
- Make a render
- Bring the render into Photoshop
- Benchmark some Backgrounds behind the composition |
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During the benchmarking process, I usually discover something new or different about the composition. At times, I stumble across the perfect background and then this becomes part of the development process. |
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I've been finding some excellent Public Domain Victorian paintings to use in this process. A number of these have emerged as very strong candidates for present and future work. |
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I want to start developing a Library/Inventory of these types of backgrounds. A good starting place was in a rough test image connected with Project - #1435-Improvisation. During one of the benchmarks, I inserted a Victorian Public Domain painting and immediately liked what resulted. |
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Now this background just sits here as a Placeholder. I have to figure out how to make a high resolution replica of this background. |
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I could create this in Photoshop or in Poser. I'm not sure which would be best, so maybe I should try both. |
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I'll try a Photoshop replica first. So, I'm going to get this file (the one above), open it, and SAVE it as backgrounds.psd to the Project Folder. |
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I'll then close down the foreground layers, get the background I want, and enlarge the whole file to 5000 x 4000 px. Note - This is taking a very, very long time. A VERY LONG time. |
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Now, we have just the background I am interested in replicating. |
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This has made the photographs in this file really bad, but all I want to do is use the existing photographs as Exemplars for the construction of newer ones. |
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For this Photoshop reconstruction, I need drapes, wall texture, a brass lamp, and palm trees. I think I can construct the wall and background using just Photoshop tools. I could probably do the same with the drapes. So, let's start by blocking out the background elements. |
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Because this file is so large, the SAVE function is taking a very long time. |
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That took 7 minutes to Save. Ridiculous. |
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I think I need to dump all the other photographs out of here is this is going to be an efficient file. |
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I'm going to see if I can construct the gold curtain in Photoshop. The curtain has 3 vertical strips showing. I'll make one strip and then just duplicate it several times for the completed curtain. |
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I made one curtain strip the same color - gold. |
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I made this wider than the strip in the Exemplar so I had a nice space to paint in. I can scale this to be thinner after I finish the strip. |
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I duplicated the layer and turned off the bottom one. I'll work on the duplicated layer. |
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I'm going to use the Brush Tool to paint in the shadowed edges of the curtain. |
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Soft Brush, 422 px, Opacity 10%. I used the Eyedropper Tool to pick up the color of the shadow. |
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I set Layer Lock so I wouldn't be painting outside the color area. I'm going to simply lay down vertical strips of paint, one over top of the other, moving the brush down in a vertical manner, over and over until the shading starts building up. |
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I'll move to the other side of the drape and carry through with the same technique. This will be lighter in nature. |
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I now have one strip. |
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I duplicated this strip 3 times and placed them side by side. I'll build a drape with 4 panels. |
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13. |
I looked at the Exemplar and the size of the Drape. I used Guides to mark the edges of the 3-panel Drape. |
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I merged the layers in the Layers Palette and then used the Show Transform Controls Tool to scale the drape so that 3 of my panels fit in the space provided by the Guides. |
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I'll turn off the Drape for now, since I'm going to work on the Wall. |
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I would like to get a Texture for the wall. I think I'll check out Mayang's Free Textures site online. |
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I downloaded 4 textures from the Walls section and imported them into the Photoshop file. |
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Three of the Texture files are quite small. |
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One Texture file is large. |
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I took the large Texture File and moved it in to fit the wall space. |
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I cut a section out of the Texture to use at the bottom. |
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I moved it into place. |
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I used the Clone Tool to clone sections of the top into the bottom to remove the connecting line between the two pieces I cut and pasted together. |
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I then Merged this into one layer. |
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Originally, I created a colored shape to represent this wall. It was basically the color I wanted, but without Texture. I duplicated this colored shape, placed it on top of the Textured section, and set opacity down so the Texture showed through. I then Merged this into one Layer Shape. |
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22. |
Okay. So this is what I have at the moment - A vertical drape and a flat wall. |
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I'm going to try and paint the background area to the left of the wall. |
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This is a fairly simple Landscape background. I'm going to create Layers with the Landscape shapes on them and then modify them using the Paintbrush Tool. There are the following Shapes.
- Foreground
- Mountain
- Cloud 1
- Cloud 2
- Sky |
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Foreground - I created a shape on a Layer behind the Wall, roughly the same shape as appears on the Exemplar. |
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Mountain - I created a shape on a Layer behind the Foreground using the Exemplar as a guide. |
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Cloud 1 - I created a shape on a Layer behind the Mountain using the Exemplar as a guide. |
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Cloud 2 - I created a shape on a Layer behind the Mountain using the Exemplar as a guide. |
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The landscape areas are very stiff and unintegrated. The contour lines are too sharp. |
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I Merged all the layers of the Landscape and used Gaussian Blur and Saturation to bring down the intensity of the landscape shapes. |
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This is better, but still not very good. There are still some things to be done, such as making the bottom hill more foliage-like and denoting the contours on a few more of the shapes. |
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I went online and Googled - Palm Tree .png file Royalty Free. I found a good .png Palm Tree that someone was giving away. |
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I installed the Palm Tree on a Layer, brought the green color up a bit, and then duplicated it. |
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Okay. This will do for now. There are still things in the Landscape that are bothering me. |
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I'm going to work on the Ledges that appear on the wall. These consist of rectangular horizontal bars with some extension at the left side. These bars are different widths. |
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32. |
I set the Rectangular Marquee Tool and Copy/Pasted a long strip from the Wall. |
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I duplicated this Layer, move it down and to the right a bit. |
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34. |
I did this several more times until I had 4 Ledges. |
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I now need to add shading at the top and bottom of each of these Ledge strips to give them a sense of realism. |
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I locked each Ledge Strip Layer and used the Paintbrush/Black/LowOpacity to paint in very light shadows along the top and bottom of each Strip. |
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I need to size each of the individual ledges, i.e., the top one is the largest and the ones underneath are smaller. |
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I sized the Ledges using the Transform Tool. |
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37. |
I duplicated this Edge Section, placed it under the existing one, and scaled it down. |
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38. |
So, this is where I am at now. |
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I need to fix up a few things in the landscape. The bottom part need a foliage texture. The trees need more defintion and some of the hills/mountains need defintion. I have to move on to the idea of the big central drap and how I'm going to construct this. |
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Ahhh. I'm kind of losing steam on this project. I think I'll put it away for a while. |