Running Wild Photography Exhibition

I began by trying to create a heavily painted scene of ponies in an Exmoor landscape using Photoshop blur, wet mixer brushes, blends and textures. I experimented with an earlier painted landscape which had worked. I just couldn’t get the images of ponies to work with these techniques. Large wet brushes made a mess of the ponies and small ones produced no noticeable effect.  Here’s one idea that might have had some potential.

I moved onto another concept – A Beast for All Seasons – showing ponies in Exmoor landscapes in each of the four seasons. I was able to take lots of images of ponies but, of course, the contextual landscapes were not always appropriate for the image. I made four composite images using ponies and landscapes from the same season and with similar lighting. These I painted and blended to provide more artistic effect. These effects don’t show up on small images, so I have included some tight crops in the gallery below (click image).

The idea was to arrange the four images in a panel but, not being able to leave well alone, I decided that it would be interesting to also insert an icon containing the title of the season.  I got carried away with this and produced four globes (based on the clever Photoshop ‘Snowglobe’ construction by Marty Geller of Blue Lightning TV).  I was quite pleased with these but it is questionable whether they work in the panel. Here they are.

By this point I was thinking I might go back to the painted landscape!

Anyway, here is the finished panel which didn’t match the theme and idiom of the Exhibition.