Day 26: Needs More Dragon

Welcome back to Thingadailies. We're currently working on a version of this Cat Butterfly Manipulation Photoshop Tutorial.

Here's where we were yesterday:

The further I get, the more I think my background choice was a mistake, but this is how we learn things, right?

Moving right along...

Step 1: Add the butterfly dragon

I already own this dragon image, so I decided to use it.

It's an odd image. I feel like I should be able to easily change the colors, but I've never successfully managed. This time, I tried this:

It doesn't look great, but I'm hoping the it will be okay since it will be tiny and have a bunch of shining lights obscuring it.

Step 2: Add shining lights

Okay, so the tutorial added an image to do this. I thought (and still do think) that I should be able to do this by adding a supernova followed by gaussian blur. And it sort of worked, but I'm not sure if it doesn't look as good because I didn't start with the bright colors of that butterfly or because the supernova didn't produce the same effect.

Step 3: Light up the cat

I tried a bunch of different things (color balance with masking, airbrush painting directly, using the burn/dodge tool to make the back of the cat darker) and I'm not completely satisfied, but it's...okay?

Step 4: Add a light reflection in the cat's eyes

This helps a lot.

Anyhow, here's the current image:

Tomorrow we add glitter/sparkles, which was one of the points of this exercise. Stay tuned!

Tip of the day:

Picking a tabby or solid color cat would have been easier than using this photo of a calico, because overlaying colors has different effects depending on whether the fur is light or dark.