Violet-tailed Sylph

This began as a digital photomanipulation, it turned into a study on layers. I created a background using some new brushes and adding several layers of this background adjusting color as the layers progressed. It is one of those pieces that keeps growing because I was having fun and it became a challenge. I then created a brush that would work well as a mixer. I blended the bird to look like a painting. For some reason I find this very fascinating; just to see how painterly I can get a photograph to look. Once I build color and soft detail on the bird I finally remove the photo then begin blending the background layers together using the mixer brush on a larger scale. Some of the background has a heavy texture "craquelure" to a portion of it. I wanted to accent the flowers at the bottom.  I drew, then painted in the background branch. In all, a total of 32 layers were created to get the look I wanted. Hint, masking mode is a wonderful action to learn. It makes this painting process on CS6 so much easier.