Sunlight on Painted Laurels

Sunlight on Painted Laurels

Sunlight strikes sheep laurel in a bog in Plymouth, New Hampshire. This image is a hand-painted monochrome. Printed in black & white, then hand-painted with Marshall Oils. After I painted the image, it is scanned at very high resolution to allow me to output it with archival inks so that the colors in the image last. One edition of 25 signed originals is created and a digitally initialed open edition before the image is archived for historic purposes and publication.

Open Edition Prints: This image shown here is a digitally initialed Open Edition print providing affordable art for your home or office. The digitally initialed open edition provides you with the closest approximation of an original without the premium cost of the original.

Originals: Printed in an original edition of 25 signed images on fine art rag paper with archival inks. To purchase an original or an affordable digitally initialed open edition print, click here: http://bit.ly/PaintedLaurels

I have established an email list to provide special advanced previews of new images, listings for upcoming shows, special offers and discount coupons to anyone willing to sign up for the list. I guarantee that your address will never be shared with anyone else and that you will never receive more than 1 email in any week, and usually fewer. Click here: http://eepurl.com/bbOh3n

Sunlight on Painted Laurels

Dance of Lupine and Birch Poster

De-emphasizing a Busy Background

Sometimes an images background is just so distracting that it makes the image unusable. Of course there are the more extreme solutions to this such as cutting out the background altogether but in the case of this bittersweet pictured right, removing the background is for practical purposes impossible because the berries are so numerous that they can't be selected out.

Well here's one way to make the background less busy in order to emphasize the central focus of the image. Using almost any good image software you remove the color entirely and then using a history brush return only the central colors to the image - or create multiple layers of saturation that achieve similar results.

Since I often prefer a more "tonal" background, I will often take an extra step and add in a single tone to make a duotone background.

Below you will see two images representing the end result of this process. The first with no color added back into the background and the second with a very muted level of color added back in. I prefer the second, but you may find the first more appealing. In either case, you are likely to agree that it makes the image more enjoyable to view.

Bittersweet Vertical 1



Bittersweet Vertical 2


Order Bittersweet Vertical #2 cards or prints