Chasing Away a Storm

In this particular work, it follows the dissipation of a storm due to the light chasing it away.

 

Upper Left

I masked an image of a dark gray storm cloud and copied it and manipulated the two to fill the entire sky. The first raindrop drawn was the yellow one. It was drawn with the lasso tool and then the scan of the yellow paper was pasted into it. Some blue drops were copied, pasted, and rotated versions of the yellow drop. The yellow was made a light blue by using a clipping mask and inverting that selection to change the hue, contrast, and brightness of the drop. Other blue drops were drawn with the lasso tool and underwent the same process of pasting, selecting, and altering the color previously described. The pond underwent a similar process with using the lasso to create the shape and pasting in a blue image. For the reflection in the pond I copied, pasted, then merged the cloud layers together. The new clouds were flipped vertically, and their opacity was lowered. A mask was then used to get rid of any part of the image that fell outside the pond border.

 

Upper Right

I copied and pasted all the elements from the first quadrant into the new quadrant. I moved the golden drop down so it looked like it was falling. I moved the two clouds further apart to begin to make it look like the clouds were beginning to part. Once they were in the position I wanted I flipped them vertically, lowered the opacity, and masked the clouds to fit in the pond shape. 

 

Lower Left and Right

The layers of the upper right corner were copied and pasted into the lower left quadrant. The clouds were moved even further apart, some of the raindrops were deleted, and the reflection was made using the same process as previously discussed. The golden drop was moved to touch the water of the pond and the bottom was masked to create a clean edge to make it look like it was entering the water. I already knew I wanted the last quadrant to be a clear sky with a full moon so I created the moon, copied it, and then edited it to be the light around the drop in the water in the lower left quadrant. I used the elliptical marquee tool to create the circle in which I pasted the same yellow paper scan that was used for the raindrops. A clipping mask was then used to select the moon to decrease the saturation and slightly increase the lightness so it would appear more white than yellow.