A Little Wintry Guitar Playing

Well here is one of my favorite ISORepublic images called Guitar Man that I often choose when trying out a new technique. I used to play guitar and I think that is why I like it. This time I liked the result so well I decided to post it. I spent a lot of today watching a video (unfortunately it was not a talky), but it was so good I took notes and worked along with the basic steps anyway. The video is on You Tube and called Technical Dost/Digital Painting/Smudge Painting/Photoshop Tutorial by Nikhil Shirkar – some of the technique just did not work for this image like a lot of the smudging, which seems to apply to portraits more than this type of image. What I did like were the brushes he linked for the download. I especially liked the Danger Pig Strokes 01 free brush set and there was also a nice white watercolor grunge texture to use. I decided to use my own background texture, but his is quite nice. Otherwise it is just adding in elements and strokes to get a nice grunge feel. I used a watercolor border at low opacity to give a little vignette effect. The notes were created from some sheet that was downloaded and made them into brushes – I use them all the time. Overall just a lot of fun to do and the only filter used was Topaz (see sidebar for website link) AI Clear to sharpen the image. And also beware that when using some free images (including this image), the resolution is set to 72 dpi. Need to adjust this by going to Image -> Image Size and setting the Resolution to 300, then uncheck the Resample – the Width and Height will readjust – and recheck. That will give you a normal size image with the correct Resolution. ….. Digital Lady Syd