If you subscribe to the Daily Texture Newsletter, you'll remember me mentioning a new food photography workshop my friend Denise Love with 2 Lil Owls released.  One of my challenges this year is to learn how to photograph something different and totally out of my element...well, food is it! :)

I created this art from a photo of a salad I eat frequently.  I wanted to get a bit "Artsy" with my photo, so I used Topaz Impression on the salad photo, and added some texture on top from my Coastal Collection.  To make the recipe area look a bit more interesting, I added one of the textures from the Unpredictable Collection.  I resized that texture and rearranged it on the canvas to just give a little more interest on the right side.  And then I added the recipe in my regular photo editing software.

If you like shrimp, btw, this is a great, quick little salad! :)  And if you want to take a challenge and learn more about food photography and get more creative with food photos, click the button below to visit Denise's workshop page:

...to show you all how much I appreciate you.  Enjoy this FREE Valentine Heart Ornament...blend your favorite subject right into the center of the heart...make some Valentine's Day cards...put some words on it...just have a little fun creating with my original, painted, red Valentine heart!

And if you haven't grabbed our retired Be My Valentine Set - we've brought it back out just until Valentine's Day -- and it's on sale!  The Be My Valentine Texture Collection features 12 lovely textures for your favorite Valentine's Day subjects. As a bonus, we've included a grouping of 17 words and phrases for you to overlay on your work if you want to add a specific Valentine message. {that's where the words came from in my Eagle Valentine above!} 

You get a GREAT flight shot, only to see the bird is too far off to one side, and/or the wing is cropped off.  Don't trash that photo!  By using a carefully selected background texture, and by doing a little masking, you can turn that photo into a work of fine art.  Watch how I transformed this image:

Into this ART:

This is a prime example of why I started working with textures and taking my photos to the next level.  All three of the above photos were taken by different photographers.  It happens.  You're on location with other photographers, photographing the same bird on the same branch at the same time of day in the same light.  {boy, that was a mouthful!}  You post those photos to a group, and one of the photos {not mine because I didn't post it} gets a comment... "Your photo & X's appear to be taken in same tree, on same limb..regardless, both photos are good!"  <~ That is NOT what I want to hear in regards to my work.  And that's exactly what I was running into, why I began doing what I do with my photos, and eventually why I started The Daily Texture, in order to help all of YOU create more unique, stand-out work with your photos.

Now my work stands out. 
Now it's different than the others. 
​Now it doesn't matter where and when I took the photo.  

Several of you have asked me about painting your photos in Procreate on the iPad, so I thought I'd do a demo of one of my recent pieces.  In video 1 below, I take you through editing the photo, blending the photo with textures, and then painting the photo in Topaz Impression to create a "pre-painting".  Then in video 2 below, I take you into Procreate to actually repaint the merged image I completed in video #1.  I hope some of you will find this helpful when carrying your photos one step farther and creating paintings from them.

This is the original photo I start with in video #1:

Below is the image result at the end of video #1:

Below is the finished painting from Procreate.  I did do three additional things to the image after getting it from Procreate back to my computer.  First, I ran Topaz Clarity Fur and Feathers 1 on the image.  Then I merged and duplicated that image.  Then using Topaz Restyle, I chose a dark brown preset, which I set to 20% opacity - this helped tone down the yellow/greens a bit and give the overall image a more earthy tone.  And finally, I added a texture from the Mesmerized Collection on top, set to soft light layer mode at 30% just to give a little more interest to the final work.

And I love to use textures and overlays to create the art the way *I* envision it.  A pose of an animal or bird often inspires me, and that was exactly the case when I got this owl photo last night:

I envisioned something more like this:

Using Topaz Photo FX Lab, and a variety of textures and overlays {links below to collections}, I shifted the light and created exactly what my creative mind saw when I looked at the original photo.  I've made a short video showing you the rundown of my layers panel and how this image was created.