How To – Digital Art Alterations

Acquire digital art alterations knowledge for a different look to fine art paintings.
Learn additional Photoshop steps to change your artwork.

Getting An Opinion

I ask my children which one of my paintings they thought would be most interesting to do a digital art alteration on. The answer was, either Encroaching Falls or Favorite End. I did both. In this post I’ll give some general pointers to my digital approach to “Favorite End”.

First here’s a glance at the “Encroaching Fall” painting image which I made a digital art alteration to for a “Happy Thanksgiving” post I shared with friends and family on my social media pages.

The Required Challenge In These Digital Art Alterations

The concept given was to bring a minimalist approach to the painting “Favorite End”. The challenge being, make it foggy to drop out more details, remove the tree branches on the left hand side, remove the flowers to simplify the look, show as little information as possible and still allow it to be a working painting.

Removing The Tree Branches

Removing The Unwanted

I started the process by isolating out the tree branches and using “Content Aware” as I deleted them. “Content Aware” replaces deleted material with surrounding color information. In this case, some of the sky area that is in the painting itself.

Repairing Replacement Info

Then I used the “Healing Brush Tool” to clean up patches of the sky that “Content Aware” filled in that did not work quite as well for me. There are times I use the brush tool to paint over areas for a better look. Content Aware and Healing Brush are wonderful tools for digital art alterations.

Adding The Fog

Finding My Way With Layer Mask

Because I’m not quite sure where I want to take this. I’m simply experimenting with different possibilities, using different “Layer Masks”. Of course, I use “Levels Layer Mask” to give it a foggy look. I’m using “Photo Filters” to try and get a feeling of color I may want. “Selective Color” as well, and “Hue Saturation” to desaturate the color in certain areas to aid the fogginess.

Gaining Some Clarity As I Go

I decided to play off a bit of the warm against cools to help give a certain look. Because the fog lessen some cloud detail, I’m painting a white edge to the clouds to help with some of the form lost. I painted in extra fog creeping over the mountains to help solidify the foggy look.

One Method To Approach Painting

Digital painting lends itself to positive and negative painting. When using a “Layer Mask” I will generally fill an area with the mask, then erase out a certain unwanted percentage of it. Because of the fog effect, I approach most of this painting in that manner.

Removing the Flowers?

Playing It Safe

Now rather than painting out the flowers, I simply try to turn them more greenish and yellow in flavor by using a “Selective Color” layer mask to help me do that. This way I can determine whether I really want to get rid of the flowers or not. After doing this, I decided to leave the flower colors to maintain a certain color balance to the picture. But I keep them toned down (or desaturate in color) by the foggy effect.

Visual Balance

Without the tree branches, the picture falls visually heavy to the right side to me. Because of this I felt it was important to put the tree branches back in to give it balance. I played around with it to push it more towards the left, not quite as far into the picture as I had it before, and kept it tone down as well. I copied and pasted branches from the original image, which means I had to erase out the old sky color around the branches in order for the new sky color to show through. Then did similar digital art alterations to shift the color to fit the new environment.

Finalizing The Look

I continue to play back and forth with various “Photo Filter” layer masks both warm and cool filters, to help me determine what range of color I wanted in this picture.

Once I finalize me decision, I cleaned up my Chinese name stamp to fit the new environment.