Behind the Scenes of Waterways Art Collection - Muted Colors

Happy Friday Creative Souls!

I have done a few post where I let you in behind the scenes :-) For this post, I am focusing on muting the images in Photoshop for a yummy twist! There is a link under the second photo to a similar post, so you can see how I paint a bit backwards in order to get a lot of icons to play with in an art collection. (click images to view larger).

I always start with sketches, some I color a bit with color pencil. In the end, I have 21 icons and 8 paintings. For example, the lighthouse above is a painting, the anchor is an icon. I also painted 2 backgrounds: An ocean/sky background and a background of circles.

Here are some progress photos of one of the paintings. Most of the time I paint the 'icon' first (in this case the sailboat) and scan it in, then finish the painting and scan the finished piece. If you want to see more of this process check out this post: Behind the Scenes: Building a Painting in a Collection.

I didn't like the large cloud! :-)

SO, to add a twist I soften the colors in Photoshop. I chose a simple way to do this. In Photoshop, open up the original painting scan. In the file menu, click on 'image', scroll down to 'hue/saturation'. Turn down the saturation to mute the colors.

Now I need to set up some repeat patterns and product mocks for this collection!

How many paintings do you paint in a collection (or central images :-) ? More? Less?
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