The Sunflowers

After applying the watercolor filter I converted the resulting image to black & white and switched it to infrared. I like the extreme variation of values. The brightest brights are well distributed throughout the image and create some interesting shapes. The darks make everything else pop. My intention is to break the original image down into more simple basic shapes without obliterating all the texture. I may take it even further. I kinda like that stormy looking sky in the background, too. I could title this Storm Flowers.

I applied the watercolor filter to the original. I didn't want too much effect so I kept the shadow at zero, texture at 3 and the brush set at 13.

The original image

Most every artist that paints florals has painted at least one sunflower but I never have. Maybe it's time I did. Like pears, sunflowers tend to be a very popular subject. I saw Vera Dennen's sunflowers on her blog and it reminded me of a photo I took several years ago of a stand of sunflowers I grew in one of my gardens. I liked this photo because I took advantage of their extreme height and shot the picture at an upward angle so the background showed nothing but blue sky and a few wispy clouds. I put the photo into Elements and cropped it, then played around with the filters hoping to get ideas for a new or different spin on the subject. These images are some of my results.