Oak Tree Green Leaves (Digital Woodcut)

Oak Tree Green Leaves (Digital Woodcut), a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

Yesterday's project was to create an image of an oak tree that could be used as an illustration on a blog. I started by searching my photos and found a few photographs of oak trees. The one that I liked best was a photo of an oak tree in from of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was posted here on Nov. 18, 2011. The only problem was that it taken in autumn and the leaves were yellow and brown, but for this project I needed an image of an oak tree in spring or summer. Instead of waiting for the arrival of spring, I decided to try to modify the picture I had. I opened the image in Painter and cropped it to get the composition I wanted. Then I used some color overlay, some digital pastel, and finally some selective color adjustments to get green leaves and a light blue sky. Finally, I applied a digital woodcut effect, and after several attempts, got the amount of black outline that I wanted.