In the corner of a French field

by | Blog, Uncategorized

This French farm stone mazet or finca was leaning in an alarming way, anybody who’s seen the leaning tower of Pisa would instantly get the idea! So, I corrected it by slightly pinching the ground with the CS warp.

These structures were lived in by poor Mediterranean farmers, normally just two rooms, one up, one down. The animals slept downstairs and the farmer on top.
Often the iron animal feeders will still be in place along a wall with a corner cooking/fireplace just where it was over 100 years ago.
Outside there is always a deep artesian well, normally these wells have a fig tree growing next or even out of them.
If you ever need to find the old well in the south of France, just look for a fig tree, and that’s where it will be. In my first French village house I found the old garden well by this very same method!

For this image, I had in mind a kind of bashed-up and rusting Victorian biscuit tin lid. It sometimes helps if you have even a slight vision or end goal in mind, then you can then start opening your chosen chocolate box of textures and try each of them!

Firstly, I always like to re-size my image to 4000 pixels along one side, to match the textures, this helps speed-up the selection process.
I’ll normally double up the base image and use a slight painterly effect.
only then do I start to play with the textures..

As ever, I list the first texture used to the last, as sequence is important!

Aquarius – Linear Light @ 72%
Brushed Rose – Color @ 30%
Europium – Vivid Light @ 50% (brushed from center and dark corners)
Touchstone – Soft Light @ 57% (brushed from lower left dark corner)
Mouse – Overlay @ 100% (brushed from over the top of the sky)
Mouse – Hard Light @ 60% (flipped horizontally, balancing the last)
Stygian Tin – Luminosity @ 79% (turned terracotta in saturation)
Base image – Overlay @ 100%
Desert Djinn – Normal @ 10%
Fly Edges number 30 – Saturation @ 60%
(some of the left and right edges clipped off)

You can see the finished big version on my Flickr.
Please feel free to leave feedback!:-)

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