Building Blocks of a Project

If you have stopped by my blog lately you know that I am working on a new Photoshop project.  I recently wrote about a tree bloom that I am hoping to include in the project.  The instructions for the project are to pick a master painting and recreate it in some way.  A way to express yourself using another person’s art as the jumping off point. It’s a pretty broad assignment.  The painting I have picked is Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses by Georgia O’Keeffe.  I picked Georgia O’Keeffe because I admire her work.  I picked this particular painting because I have actually seen it in person.

My hope for this project is for my work to be a tribute but not an identical copy.  I will be using a cow’s skull though.  I borrowed one and took some photographs.  The rest of this post is about the shooting and editing of the skull.  Here is the original photo:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/125

Because the tree bloom that I shot a few days before was shot in natural light, I also shot this using natural light and at about the same time of day.  The first thing I did with this unedited photo was to get rid of the cloth seam.  I used content aware fill to do that and it worked nicely.  I then sharpened the image a bit.  Next,  I used the Oil Paint filter to create a painted look.  Here is a screen shot of the settings that I used:

These are the settings for the Oil Paint filter

And here is the final skull:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/125

The next step will be to add the tree bloom and then to consider adding a background element.

Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any thoughts or questions about this project.

Cheers!