Botanical

This is for the Botanical challenge at Take a Word.

Click image to enlarge.

The word botanical makes me think of those detailed drawings of leaves and plants. I was going for a somewhat whimsical look here. I wanted a leaf that still looked like a leaf, but also so you could see what I see when I look closely at a leaf--a little tree.

I picked a leaf and scanned the back of it where all the veins can be seen. Then I did magical things to it using probably five layers where I carefully separated the veins to color them brown and did some fancy footwork with noise and pixel effects to give them texture and a hint of leaves, and added a shadow to give them depth. I gave each tree a cast shadow, that was set at around 45% transparency. There are probably more than twenty layers in my working copy.

I used a photo I took this morning of a large lawn and played around with it to make it look a little more like a painting.