Art Question: How did you do that?

How did I go from this - on the left - to this, on the right? I was asked this question recently so I thought I'd answer it right here.

First, why? Why all the work to remove the background?

Well part of my art business is to create designs for wedding correspondence, note cards in general and other types of products. The number of artists who can make their living exclusively through the sale of their original art as compared to the rest of us is very tiny. So, the most of us work in all kinds of ways to use their creative efforts.  Also, there are a great many artists like me who work in more than one medium. I work in mosaics, digital art and art photography. I sell my mosaics as originals only...there are no images of them you can purchase - no prints or cards. The other media in which I work I do market in various ways: originals, limited editions [this will be new this year], prints, cards and images on other types of products.

I opened a Zazzle store [ Lala's Floral Shop ] last year and one of the first categories of products I wanted to produce was wedding invitations [and other associated wedding paper goods]. Back in the day, besides working as a newspaper reporter, I also worked for a time as an advertising designer. I got pretty good at designing. So, for me, designing wedding invitations wasn't a far leap and, besides, it seemed like it could be a fun way to use my own images. At first I thought it would be a good idea to illustrate [draw] something original, but I'm so into photography that that seemed the better way to go - illustrate using my photos.

At about the same time as I was musing about all this, on a nice sunny afternoon, I did some grocery shopping.

This was a pretty large store and had an impressive floral section. On this day there was a couple of buckets of freshly cut sunflowers.  They were lovely! I thought a bouquet of them would look awesome in a vase on my dining room table so bought a bunch.  And, yes, I thought they looked pretty cool as the photo above left shows.

After I got the groceries put away I started to walk around the table admiring the sunflowers.  They really did look awesome. Then it struck me: an idea of how to use those blossoms.  I thought the arrangement would look good on a card. So I hauled out my camera and tripod and got busy. I shot them as they were on the table; I stood on a chair and shot down; I kneeled on the floor and shot up; I put the vase on a black cloth to see how that would look. However when I looked at all the photos I took of the arrangement, there was only one photo that had the angle and arrangement I really wanted and wouldn't you know, it was one taken with the vase on the kitchen table. So, what to do? Who wants a card with a table, placemat and bookcase in the background?

What had to happen was to erase out every bit of the background.  I took my photo into my old Photoshop program and went to work.  This was one of those times when the "art work" was long and tedious...it took quite a while. Now, when I can, I will work in comfort.  I took my laptop into the living room to my black leather easy chair, popped a tv series on dvd into the dvd player and settled into a long afternoon of work.

This photo shows a cropped bit and you can see there is quite a lot of background to remove. But the picture is so small it would be difficult to erase with any accuracy.

So I enlarged it until I could see pixels and just went along one petal edge after another until voila! the background was gone. This sample photo doesn't really do justice to the actual process. There was lots of using the erase tool, then un-doing the erase tool and beginning a section again.  Lots of uber enlarging an area and then taking it back to normal to view the progress. Yep, lots o' good old-fashioned working-your-fingers-to-the-bone.

Once the background was gone, was I done? No. Then came some further work tweaking the lightness and contrast, some color manipulation and putting it through some artistic filters. Then I proclaimed it done and put the image itself to work.

The first product I used with this image is a wedding invitation: 

The image itself has enough going for it that I can manipulate it - move it so that only one edge shows, like for the invitation;

or fill a corner as with the Thank You note.  It's fun...once you've done the work you get to use your images in creative ways.  I also did an orchid and a white rose [below]; what's next? I have a few photos of that sweet little flower called Johnny-Jumpups that I think could work well. Oh, so many ideas and so little time!