Edit This Contest - Night Time Prowl

Occasionally Fine Art America has an "Edit This" contest where they provide a photo and ask us to edit it to make it our own piece of art. They do want the original photo to be recognized in some way. They then have a contest and vote for the best design.

For this contest, a photo was provided of a river scene from Manchester England.Above you can see the before and after photos. I did a variety of different edits in both Gimp , Corel Painter Essentials, and Lightroom programs to come up with this final mixed media art piece.

As you can see in the original provided photo, the sky had a lot of empty space so I decided to change it to a night time theme and add in one of my milky way photos I took near Sparta Missouri. This of course also required me to darken the provided photo to make it more of a night time, late evening scene. I then replaced the moon with a larger full moon photo I had taken in Ozark Missouri.

I wanted to do something with the walkway so I remembered a photo shoot I took of a beautiful Siberian Husky running through the snow. Since husky's have a lot of wolf in them, I thought it would be a good fit. However, it did offer a few challenges. The first challenge was the light difference since it was taken in the snow which is bright. The second challenge was the size proportion and the third challenge was the feet because Miya was running through the snow so some of her feet was buried and some of the snow was flying up over her legs and feet. Then the fourth and last challenge was making her blend in with the scene. I had to take some of the dirt and grass and put around her feet so it looked like she was somewhat kicking the dirt around. After combining and blending everything together, I transformed the photo into a couple different painting styles. All of these edits were done in Gimp using several layers.

I then took the photo and added some texture using the Painter Essentials program which has my favorite texture options. It really gives the mixed media art piece a somewhat 3D look and imaginary feel to it.

The last edits happened in Lightroom where I did a lot of color adjusting, additional blending in on Miya (the Siberian Husky), and I added some light effects including light in the windows of the home, and on the light post. I also created a reflection of the moon on the water using Lightroom.

It took a while to create this, but I think it turned out really cool. What do you think? Since I won the last contest, I'm not able to win for the next 5 contest, but I can still enter them and people can still vote. If I should get 1st again, they'll make the 2nd place one the winner. Stay tuned and I'll let you know what place I take in this contest.

Here's the link to the final photo: https://5-jennifer-white.pixels.com/featured/night-time-prowl-jennifer-white.html
Here's the link to the contest: https://fineartamerica.com/contests/edit-this-2020-2.html?tab=overview