Airbrush - Painting B&W Image

I started with this image,


I felt like there were too much gray so I played with the levels, clipped the highlights a bit and lighten the black output levels

Created a sepia tone with color balance,

Now I'm ready to paint my image with a Wacom tablet (first time using it :))

I chose a color of 225:191:92 to paint my image with (trying to achieve an "oak" color). I started by painting the tree trunks

Oops, I forgot to change my blending mode to color, here we go,

I felt like the color was over saturated for a b&w image so I lowered the opacity to 30% and gave it another shot,

A few minutes later...

Now it was time to paint the sky. I learned something VERY cool today! When using the magic wand tool, I went to 'Select-->Grow' (to expand my area of selection via magic wand tool), 'Select-->Similar' and the whole sky was selected!! So I tried to get a cyan color for the sky and filled it in with a color mode layer,

Again I felt like there were too much colors so I lowered the opacity to 25% and gave it another shot!

Now it was time to paint the leaves, I had 2 colors, a green for my foreground color and a yellow-ish green for my background color (x to switch back and forth). I started painting the leaves green.

I felt like there was too much green for my liking so I decided to paint over it with my yellow-ish green color. Here's a 50/50.

And the results,

Now I felt like the image was too boring so I decided to try out a gradient. (Linear gradient)

It actually came out pretty interesting. I gave it another shot to see if I can get a sunset look...

Not really? oh well .. haha. Now I went at it again with a Radial gradient and I made a sun!

I felt like the colors were too strong so I faded it a bit. (Edit-->Fade Gradient)

That's it for today :). Have a good weekend guys!


I decided to do one more with a lens flare (suggested by Jeff Wu) :)