…but not in a pea green boat (although that would have been clever, now that I think about it). I think this is by far the most complex of the pictures I’ve yet to put together for Susan Tuttle’s Digital Layers class. I used a picture I had taken several years ago on a trip to St. Andrews-by-the-Sea in eastern Canada. I had always really liked the picture — especially the distant light house and the sea gull, but the harbor water was too dominate and kind of boring. Using a stock photo of a boat and a quick snap of my kneeling daughter’s back I cropped out a section of the water and added the boat.
I used three layers of the find edges filter: the first one was an inverse that was set to “lighten” blend mode which created the highlighted edges. The second layer was a normal find edges filter and then set to “linear burn” blend mode — that created the dark lines that look like a pencil. The final layer was another normal find edges filter that was desaturated and then set to “linear burn.” That made the edges even darker and creates the hand-drawn effect.
I used three texture layers — a cracked canvas texture, a dirty window texture and a linen-type texture that I then modified with a blue-grey adjustment layer set to “color” blend mode. (It’s very handy for changing the color of the textures to something that fits your scene better).
And finally I used a script brush with the opacity lowered to around 50%.
After several days of false starts and horrible mistakes I was very happy to finally have put together something lovely. I am very happy with how this turned out and I am really liking how the “find edges” makes things look so more painterly than picture. I am definitely going to keep experimenting with this.